


a cage for every unclean spirit

by shuofthewind



Series: The Making of Monsters [SIDEFICS] [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Actual Alley Cat Matthew Murdock, Alternate Season/Series 01, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Darcy Never Met Jane, Angst, BUT LITERALLY ALL THE ANGST AND SELF-LOATHING, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Guilt, Companion Piece, Darcy Is Allergic To Feels, Especially To Himself, F/M, I KEEP SAYING THIS, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Karen Page: Milk and Honey Warrior Queen, Male-Female Friendship, Marvel 616/MCU Crossover, Matt's Really Good At Lying, Mentions of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Missing Scenes, Pining, Polyromantic Matt Murdock, So Much Angst So Prepare Yourselves, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Vanessa Marianna Is No Angel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:47:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 52,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4620729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He realizes all at once that he's cursed with wanting things he could never, ever deserve. </p><p>[Or, the one where Matt overthinks <em>everything</em>.]</p><p>[Companion scenes from <em>The Price of War</em>. Matt POV. Complete.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Point Zero - Stay

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: Violence, remembered violence, discussion of childhood sexual abuse (not of the speaker), discussion of self-loathing, implication of suicidal tendencies. 
> 
> :( 
> 
> Matt, baby, you make me hurt inside. 
> 
> (The smut is coming, don't bite my face off. Sometimes you just need to write angst.) 
> 
> Title from "Beast and the Harlot" by A7X, which kind of screams Daredevil/Lilith to me in a lot of weird ways. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed. Sorry for typos.

Matt’s more than halfway up the stairs to the fourth floor of Carman Hall by the time he realizes the room is occupied.

He really should have noticed earlier. But his fists ache, and he’s still shaking, adrenalin punching through him like a drug, like a cancer. He can barely hear over his own heartbeat, even an hour after. Blood is all he can smell, really, heavy, coppery in his throat. And so he doesn’t tip his head at the street corner, doesn’t seek out heartbeats or scents the way he’s made a habit of after a night out, and now he’s nearly to his room—somewhere private, somewhere safe—and Darcy Lewis is asleep inside.

He’s so used to her being there that he doesn’t consciously notice her presence, half the time, and as for the other half, he’s come to expect it. But not tonight. God, she shouldn’t be near him tonight. He stops just outside the door, closing his eyes, listening. She’s asleep, dreaming, maybe. Her heartbeat is too fast for someone deep in REM. There’s blood drying tacky on his mouth, and he can still feel it inside him, the devil, clawing up his throat and down into his fists. _No_ , Mickey says in his head, _no, please, stop_ , and the monster sinks its talons into his carotid. _You’ll never touch her again,_ he’d told Mickey’s father, and then he’d broken him, over and over, bones and flesh and cartilage. _Never again. You try, and I’ll find you._

 _No_ , he thinks. _She can’t be near me tonight_.

He could go somewhere. Wander until morning. Wait until the library opens, sit there until class. If he even goes to class. Claim a night out with a stranger, if anybody asks where he was. It’s what he always says, for the nights he spends out on the streets. It’s not as if he goes out every night to beat the shit out of child molesters, but he spends too many midnights perched on rooftops, relishing the feel of the wind, the taste of the night air. It’s the only gift Stick really left him with, that sense of freedom he gets when he can take off his glasses and hide his cane and just _run_ , push himself, faster and harder, more and more daring, more and more reckless, until someday something goes wrong and he falls and breaks his neck. That hasn’t happened yet, of course, but there’s the creeping sense under his feet that someday it really might, and he’d be lying if he said that that’s not half the reason why he does it. That feeling, that sense of racing through the city, almost as if he’s flying—it’s not as if he can explain it to either of them. Foggy huffs at him and asks about all these fictional women, and then Darcy gets that weird tension to her hands and throws herself into the conversation, like she’s trying to prove something. He’s considered, once or twice, that it might be jealousy, but no—not with her. Darcy’s honest when she’s jealous, usually overly so, and so no. Whatever the cause, it’s not jealousy.

Maybe she’s worried he’ll catch an STD. The thought makes something tickle at his throat that almost feels like laughter.

Beyond the door, she mutters something that sounds like _stop_ , and rolls over. Matt presses his palm to the door, curls his fingers in. The grain of the door whirls counterclockwise against his fingertips. It’s heavy, made of some kind of dense wood and layered over with metal to keep it from being scratched, but when he scrapes his nails against the material, he can still feel minute divots in the tin. God, he’s still shaking. Relief or disgust or excitement, he’s not sure why. Something about it is making him feel inhuman. Foggy’s not inside, and when he closes his eyes, when he breathes in, he can’t find Foggy anywhere in the building. _Out, then._ One less person to worry about. But where should he go?

He could always go looking for another fight.

He closes his hand tight into a fist, draws it back. Then he rests it against the door again, as carefully and as silently as he can, just to prove to himself that he can manage it. The tendons in his wrist are shaking. _Not tonight. Not ever again._

 _Oh, you liar, Murdock,_ a voice says in the back of his head. It sounds like his own. _You goddamn liar._

Darcy _is_ dreaming. A nightmare. He feels sick for doing it, like he’s using her—and he _is_ using her, _don’t be a liar, Matt, you already lie about everything else, don’t lie about this_ —but Matt focuses in hard, pushing the rest of the world out. She smells like the library, like books and ink from that damn leaky pen she always uses. She must have gone to Jen’s, because he can catch hints of cat, too, and of highlighters. Though that could be from studying. Shampoo and soap and detergent, coffee and pasta and cigarette smoke.She’s been smoking a lot, lately, like the nicotine is helping her chase something away. Or fight something off. He rests his forehead to the door, trying to breathe. Her heartbeat is picking up, and he focuses on that, only on that, until he can almost feel the rhythm of it through his whole body. And for some reason, it helps.

He’s never asked her about her nightmares, mostly because he doesn’t feel like he has the right to. Not considering everything. This one isn’t bad, comparatively, but it’s not the best, either. A high, thin sound creaks out of her, like a knife scraping over porcelain. He can still smell blood, but it’s faded a little. Like it’s old. The adrenalin’s finally starting to cycle out of him, though it hits in a rhythm like contractions, every minute, sending electric currents down his spine, through his veins. _Stop,_ Mickey’s father had whispered, _stop, please,_ and all he can think of is hearing Mickey say the same thing, over and over, _Dad, stop, please,_ and she’s eleven years old and he’s been touching her for years, Matt knows it like he knows the rhythm of his lungs, because men like Mickey’s father don’t just wait for puberty, they start at the very beginning, defenseless infants, voiceless, unknowing, growing up thinking that the betrayal is their fault, that it’s normal, that it’s _typical_ , and Christ, he should have killed the bastard, he should have smashed his head open on the gravel, should have—

 _Stopped it_.

Matt stands there for a full minute, listening, and the devil is slinking back into his hole. Then, two doors down, James Mallory rolls out of bed with a muffled _“fuck,_ ” and there’s not really any time. He could go hide in the bathroom, but it’s too bright, there. He couldn’t hide the smears on his hands under the fluoros. And suddenly he’s tired, he’s _so_ tired, and all he wants is to hide. So even though he knows how much of a bastard he is for doing it, he unlocks the door and slips into the dorm just as Mallory stumbles out into the hall.

She comes awake in an instant. She always wakes up too quickly, like she’s expecting something bad to happen. Darcy makes an awkward sound, deep in the back of her throat, and Matt stills, because he has to. _I don’t know you’re there,_ he tells himself, and god, he hates himself. _I didn’t realize._

“Darcy. sorry. Go back to sleep.”

She knows something’s wrong. He can hear it in how her breathing changes, how she cocks her head. And Jesus Christ, this is exactly what he didn’t want: her focused on him, her realizing something’s different, because if she realizes too much she’ll never speak to him again, and he’s such a selfish bastard, Jesus, _Jesus_ —“It’s fine.” Her voice is sleep-rough, curdled from the nightmare, and he wonders if she realizes there’s tear tracks on her cheeks. “Bad dreams. What’s wrong?”

Matt curls his hand tight around the cane. Something in his left ring finger stings. He might have fractured something. Then he rests the cane against the wall, beneath the light switch. “I’m fine,” he says, and nudges the door shut with his foot. He puts too much fury into it, and the thing slams. _Fuck._ He has to get her to leave, somehow. Though where she’ll go, he has no idea. It’s three in the morning, tomorrow’s one of her rare days off, and it wouldn’t be safe for her to catch a taxi. Not right now.

_She has to leave._

She swings her legs over the edge of the bed. She’s wearing Foggy’s shirt, he realizes, using Foggy’s bed. It’s odd, having their scents lay over each other like that. It makes his head spin, makes something squeeze hard and cold in the base of his throat. Then he feels it again, the crunch of breaking bone under his fist, and thinks, _I’m so screwed_. Darcy clears her throat, tilts her head. “You sound like—” She gropes for a word. “You sound terrible.”

 _So do you._ She always sounds terrible after a nightmare. He can remember a night in sophomore year, Darcy curled in her sleeping bag between his and Foggy’s beds. Foggy snores, too loudly to really hear anything that goes on around him while he sleeps, but Matt lies awake, sometimes. Her nightmare had snapped her awake with a sort of rebounding, reverberating viciousness that he can only ever associate with being punched, and when he’d rolled onto his side and offered his hand, she’d taken it without a sound. There’s a scar on the first knuckle of her right hand from a steam burn at Starbucks. He’s not sure she even knows it’s there. He keeps his face turned away from her, because even though he can’t hear the buzz of a burning light bulb, he’s not sure he can trust that she won’t notice the smears near his mouth. “It’s nothing,” he says, and he tries to make himself sound as normal as possible. He fails miserably. “Don’t worry about it.”

Matt closes his eyes when he realizes she’s reaching for the desk lamp. _Nothing for it, now._ And it’s almost a relief, because this way he knows it’s only Darcy who will see it, Darcy who has her own secrets. There’s something thin and cruel and desperate in him that makes him wonder if this will be the last straw, if this will be the thing to make her come to her goddamn senses and leave him the fuck alone. Something else turns brittle at the thought of it.

He can’t imagine what she sees. A monster, maybe. A bastard. A Murdock. He doesn’t know. But something about him makes her breathing catch, makes her stand and slip across the room, bare feet barely making a sound, even for him. “Hey.” She hesitates, and then raises her hand, and the touch of her fingertips to his wrist stings the way blessings do. “Hey,” she says again, and her voice is much quieter this time. “What happened?”

 _I was born,_ he nearly says. Was he created with this inside him, or did he craft it himself? But no. He wants to run, to shout, to scream at God. _Why did You make me this way?_ He wants to leave. He wants to stay. He wants to reach back out to her, smear the blood over her cheeks, say _this is what I am_ and not have her flee in terror. But he can’t hope for that, so he draws his hands away, and hides them in his sweatshirt pocket instead. “Darcy, seriously, I’m okay. Stop asking. _Please_ ,” he says, and he’s not sure if he’s asking her to leave or to stay or to ask or to pretend this never happened, or all four of them at once. “Just go back to sleep.”

She swallows once, twice. Curls her fingers into her palms. Then she clenches her teeth. The next touch is almost a surprise, so light against his elbow it could be a breeze. “I’ll be right back.” She fumbles around for a moment, grabs a sweatshirt that smells like Foggy, yanks it on. It doesn’t actually do much, considering she’s only wearing underwear beneath the too-large T-shirt, but he can hear fabric against her legs, catching in the air. “Get into bed,” Darcy tells him, and this is the part of her that drives him crazy sometimes, the one that has to mother everything and everyone, like it’s her job. “I’ll be right back.”

 _Don’t,_ he nearly says. _Just stay away tonight._ But she’s trying to help him, and for god’s sake, it’s Darcy. He can’t send her away. He doesn’t think it’s physically possible for him to send her away. So he shuts his mouth, listening to her fumble through her duffel bag, curse under her breath until she finds her wallet. She stands beside him, just for a moment, like she’s debating about something. Then she goes up on tiptoe, and sets her mouth to his cheek. It barely lasts a second, less than a heartbeat, but time seems to freeze and stretch, a pocket universe where everything in the world has ended but this. She’s done it before, and she’ll do it again, but for some reason this time it transfixes him, nails him to the floor, because she swamps him when she’s this close, skin and warmth and hair and Darcy, and her lips are touching blood. His throat squeezes like he’s about to cry. He’s not worthy of this, of trust from her, of affection, but he wants it anyway, so, so desperately he thinks he might burn up from the heat and the power of it. _Shampoo and coffee, bleach and ink and cigarettes._ He wants to hide in it, drown in it, bury himself in the feel and taste and smell and sound of her, and she’s clearing his head and fogging it out all at once, her heartbeat is muffling in his ears and her hand is pressed like a brand to his shoulder, and what would she do if he turned and caught her lower lip with his, what would she do if he set his stained, bloody hands in her hair and pulled her closer, what would she do if she knew that he—

His brain stutters.

 _Oh,_ Matt thinks. Then again, because he can’t stop himself: _Oh._

She’s gone before he can take a full breath, the door shutting quietly behind her.

He moves on autopilot, because now that she’s gone he can stop thinking about what it would look like. He changes clothes. Something feels wrong when he goes to wipe the blood off, so he leaves it. He’d managed to get the worst of it off his hands and face under a faucet in a subway bathroom, but there’s still more than a bit crusting under his fingernails. He leaves it behind, a reminder. _Remember what you did._ The strip of black cloth he’d used as a mask is wrapped up in a plastic bag, and buried underneath the rest of the trash between their desks. _Remember who you are._ And Stick looms up in his head, a voice in the dark. _We’re not like them, Matty. We work alone. That’s the only way this shit actually works._ But he can still feel her lips on him, and he wonders if it’s always going to be like this, from now on, memorizing every touch, because he’s always been brilliant at lying to himself, but there’s no way he can do it, now. Not with the realization still twisting into him, a corkscrew under his skin.

_(What would she do if she knew that I—)_

The smell of her hangs in the room like smoke.

 _How could you miss this?_ He drops down onto the end of his bed, fights the urge to put his face in his hands. Mickey is screaming in his head. _How did you not realize this?_ He can hear her swearing at the vending machine a floor down, bouncing on the balls of her bare feet, and everything in him hurts. _What are you going to do?_

( _What would she do if I said that I_ —)

Darcy in Foggy’s sweatshirt. He hears it echoing again, _no, stop, please,_ and he’s not sure if it’s Mickey, or her father, or himself, and Christ. _Christ._ He can’t do anything. He _won’t_ do anything. He won’t be the one responsible for ruining them. He can’t afford to lose them, either of them, not Foggy or Darcy, and if he does something, if he does _anything_ , he will probably lose them both. And he can’t. He _can’t_ , not the only two people who have ever treated him like he’s solid, physical, reparable. He can’t go back to being spun glass. He can’t go back to being alone _._

_Am I gonna be the first person to make the ‘justice is blind’ joke, or have, like, a million people said that already?_

Matt presses the heels of his hands into his useless eyes. The edge of his glasses digs into his temple. On the street outside, a crosswalk alert starts to beep.

He’s still more than half on autopilot by the time she comes back. And he’d have thought, if it were daylight, that it would be different having her near him, now, like acid on a blister, but no, it’s just Darcy, telegraphing her movements through touch, letting him know where she is without thinking about it because that’s just what she does, natural as breathing. There’s a knot of something beneath his sternum that could be grief or adoration or some kind of misbegotten twist of the two, and the Cheetos are like cardboard on his tongue. He thinks—he’s so stupid, but he thinks she’ll back off once the light’s out again, once he’s horizontal, but instead of going back to Foggy’s bed, she perches at the head of his. Her nails scrape over his scalp, and it feels as though he’s been shot through with lightning.

“Foggy’s gone for the night,” she says, and her voice is so soft that it almost strokes against his skin. “He’s dating that girl from his advanced civic law class.”

He listens—for what, he doesn’t know—but there’s no frustration in her voice, no jealousy or sadness. Just a statement of fact. Her heartbeat doesn’t change. But the scent of him still clings to her, and god, he can’t, he _can’t_ —

“I won’t ask.” Her voice dips lower. “But I’ll stay with you, if you need me to.”

She says _need_ instead of want, like she can’t imagine that he would want her to stay. _No, stop, please,_ Mickey says, but he shoves that back, because _want_ isn’t a word that he can apply to this, anymore. Neither is _need_ , or, at least, not _need_ like _I need a drink_ or _need_ like _I need to rest._ This is need like needing air, needing blood, needing a heart in his chest to survive, and how can five minutes of knowledge rewrite what feels like a lifetime of ignorance? _I need her,_ he thinks, and this is exactly what Stick said he wasn’t, but he can’t bring himself to care about Stick, not with Darcy so close, watching him. He can’t afford to risk this, but he can’t imagine not having it, just for a moment, just for a night.

He slides his fingers into the pocket of Foggy’s hoodie, and it’s the only hint she needs. Darcy takes off her glasses, and slips into the bed next to him, and she’s so close it’s overpowering him all over again. He feels like a teenager when she heaves a sigh, because he can feel her breath on his throat, almost taste it on his tongue. It shoots through him like a drug, or a sin, to have her this close when he’s already told himself he won’t do anything. That he can’t.

Her fingers hook into the cloth over his heart.

Darcy’s asleep before an hour’s passed, breathing quietly, her chin tucked in close to her collar. Matt lies awake, and even if he can’t watch her, he listens. Every time she exhales, a strand of hair flutters against her cheek. It’s dyed purple, this month, or that’s what Foggy tells him. He’s still learning the variations in scent when it comes to colors in hair dye, and for the most part the bleach overpowers it anyway. There’s traces of blood on her fingers from where she’d wiped it off him. If he moves, he might wake her, but he can’t stop himself. Matt lifts his hand from her waist and up to her cheek, drawing two fingers along the edge of her jaw. Her hair shifts. Darcy wrinkles her nose—he hears it in the way she makes a muffled sound, almost a protest—but her breathing doesn’t change, her heartbeat doesn’t shift. She fits under his chin, and when he tips his head forward, he can hide his nose in her hair. He can’t smell anything but her, now. Not really.

He rests his mouth against her hairline. It’s not a kiss, he tells himself. Not really. It’s an accident.

He’s always forgotten how good he is at lying to himself.

 


	2. Confessions - Hospital

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: Violence, assault, description of assault, consideration of murder, blood, mentions of bullying, mentions of intimate partner violence.
> 
> Whoa, you guys. SO MUCH LOVE FOR THIS. /smooches/

Foggy had been the one to call him. Matt had waited on the rooftop until he’d made certain that she was in a car on the way to the hospital, and then he’d slipped through the night after the scents of the men who’d come after Darcy. The trails were still clear enough for him to find a car, empty, stinking of cigarettes and with knives in the trunk. He’d been tracing the license plate out with his fingertips— _TLV 320_ , something he can have one of the officers at the 15th look up for him, claim it’s for another case—when his phone had gone off, and Foggy had babbled in a voice that was just on the edge of hysterical that Darcy had been mugged and he needed to get to the hospital _right now,_ “I’m gonna call Jen.”

The hospital won’t let them in. In a way, it’s a relief. He’s riding on the edge of the devil, still, and if he hears her right now, he’s not sure what he’ll do. Jen won’t be here for another half an hour, so when the nurse comes back and offers to take a few of them through (Karen’s here, fretting with the edge of her purse, her fingernails snapping with the force of it) Matt says he’ll stay behind and wait for Jen. Foggy doesn’t question it, but Karen shifts, like he’s startled her. Matt can’t give a shit right now. He waits until they’re gone, and then gropes for the nearest chair, sinking down into it and closing his eyes. _Breathe, damn you. Breathe._

(—the pole weighs heavy in his hands and he wants to use it, no matter how it makes the wound in his side scream, he wants to slam it into this man over and over again, because he can smell tears in the air, and blood, and her breathing catches every time she inhales, like she’s being stabbed, and _how dare you—_ )

She’s alive. She’s hurt (—and he should have been smarter about it, made sure she made it home all right, should have known better—) and she’s cursing her nurse under her breath, he can hear it from here, but she’s _alive._ And it’s killing him a little bit to sit here knowing that Foggy and Karen are fretting over her, and he can’t be there. Not yet. Not until—

Coffee and cat hair and the click of chopsticks through long hair. “Matt,” Jen says, almost snapping it out, and he turns his face towards the sound of her voice. Jennifer’s trembling. It’s not something that he’s ever heard her do before, but her hands are scuffing against her hoodie. She reaches out and hooks one hand through his elbow, automatic. “Where is she?”

“ICU. Foggy’s with her.” He lets Jen pull him along towards the elevator. “He didn’t say much about what happened.”    

(—perched on the edge of his building, listening, and suddenly there’s a name he knows _, the case with Kate Bishop, drop it,_ and that voice, that _voice_ , he’s halfway down the fire escape before he even remembers moving, because _y’know, where I come from we ask_ nice _when we want people to do things for us_ and then the scream, he’s never going to forget the scream, not until the day he dies _—_ )

“He just said Brett c-c-called him and that Darcy was hurt, I d-didn’t—” she mashes the up button too many times, and then digs her nails into her palm hard enough for him to hear skin split. “God fucking _d-dammit_.”

He can’t say he’s ever heard Jen swear like that, but he agrees with the sentiment. “They let Foggy through a few minutes ago, so it can’t—it can’t be very bad.”

(—blood on her face from her nose, her mouth. Over her arm. He can hear it dripping from her hand, and he can remember the screaming, the clatter of a knife hitting the concrete. She has it in her hand, point out, and she’s breathing too-fast, like she’s trying to keep herself from panic, and he wants to rip these men into pieces because _you don’t touch her_ —)

Jen nods once, then realizes he won’t be able to see it. “Okay,” she tells him, and the way that her fingers dig into his elbow is more than enough. She bounces on the balls of her feet as the elevator flickers up through the floors to the ICU. It’s a habit she’s picked up from Darcy, or that Darcy’s picked up from Jen, one or the other, one that they’ve both done for as long as he can remember. It’s oddly soothing. Matt keeps his hands loose, trying not to hate too loudly. Jen’s eyes are far too sharp for that, after all.

( _—who do you work for,_ and the man underneath him is bleeding and gasping and his heart is rabbiting inside his chest, but Matt feels as though he’s made of stone, as if he’s been carved out of meteorite, burning too hot, singeing everything he touches, and when he reaches around and twists the man’s arm backwards and crossways, the terrible _snap_ of his elbow and the shriek that follows is a single note of the symphony of agony he wants to put this man through, because _you bastards will never touch her_ —)

The Intensive Care Unit smells too-strongly of isopropyl alcohol, of bleach and gauze and blood with the stale, sour scent of sickness layered under it all. Next to him, Jen is shaking harder, and she draws away from him like she’s forgotten he’s there at all. He can hear Foggy and Darcy talking, voices mixing and matching. Karen’s heart is beating too fast, and every time Darcy moves, she shifts too. “You,” Jen snaps, and her voice is even and unhesitating, “which room is Darcy Lewis in?”

The nurse—male, young, confused—pauses. “I’m sorry, are you a relative? Only—”

“She’s my _fucking sister, you asshole_!”

And it hits Matt all at once—how the hell did Foggy get in, anyway? _He must have said he was her brother._ He was already here when Matt arrived, even if it was only a three minute head start, but they wouldn’t have let him in if he hadn’t said something like that. They might not let Matt in at all.

“There’s no need to yell,” says the ward supervisor, who’s booked it over to deal with Jen. Her perfume is overwhelmingly full of honeysuckle, and it makes him want to sneeze. “Ma’am, I understand you’re upset, but—”

“It’s okay, they’re with me,” Foggy says, and touches Matt’s elbow. In the same instant, Jen bolts for Darcy’s room. Matt leans into Foggy’s hand, just for a moment, before drawing away. “She’s doing okay,” Foggy says in a low voice as they follow after Jen. “Doctor said she has a fractured rib but she didn’t mention it. She hit her head. They want to keep her here until they’re sure everything comes out clean.” He stops, and starts again. “These bastards used a knife on her, Matt. There’s—they had a _knife_ to her throat.”

“I thought it was a mugging,” Matt says, but he can hear it all over again, metal in flesh and _I want to do it. I want this bastard to suffer. But I want to do it my way._ Foggy shakes his head.

“They were trying to get her to drop the case—you try to convince her? She’s not listening to Karen or me.”

His throat feels very dry. “Jen would have better luck with that.”

“Well, at least try.”

( _—leave them out of this, you leave them alone, you son of a fucking bitch,_ and the way her voice had sounded in that moment, Christ, he’d break them all just for that if he could, and he can hear their heartbeats, smell them, a floor down, wrapped up in a morphine fog, he could go in and kill them and nobody would be able to stop him, he _could_ , because suddenly all the reasons he’s listed for himself that these kind of men still deserve a fair trial, still deserve to live, seem very thin, scraps of smoke on a hurricane wind—)

“Here, this one,” Foggy says, and they stop at the doorway just in time to hear Jen let out a high-pitched whine, a dog who’s been told to stay put while its pup is torn away from it. Foggy steps away from him, already throwing himself into the argument. Karen says nothing, but she holds herself like she’s about to jump between them, Darcy and Foggy and Jen. Matt’s not sure if it would be to break it up, or lash out at Jen and Foggy. Darcy has a talent for earning the loyalty of lost people, and Karen seems to have joined their meagre ranks.  

It’s stupid to be so transfixed, but for two breaths—he only allows himself two breaths, because anything more would be too obvious—he just stands there and listens to her voice, her breathing, reminding himself that she’s alive. Hurt and bloody, still, words catching on her swollen tongue (— _must have bitten it when they hit her the first time—_ ) and her lungs pushing up against swollen flesh and a crackling rib cage, but _alive._ He closes his eyes just for a moment behind his glasses before stepping into the room, drawn around to the edge of the bed as if he’s being tugged. She turns her face towards him, and he can _hear_ it when she smiles because it makes her wince. Still, she reaches out without hesitation, and touches his hand, stealing the cane, setting it aside. He feels flesh under his fists again.

“Hey.” His voice cracks. _God, don’t scare me like that ever again,_ is on the tip of his tongue. So are a million other things. _What do you need?_ is probably the next strongest. _Don’t sass mob strongmen_ , is the third. And underlying it all is just the _thank God, thank God, thank God_ that she’s alive. When he rests his hand to her shoulder, to the warmth underneath her hair, she heaves a little breath and leans into him, hiding her face. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

It’s a lie, even if her heartbeat doesn’t change. Because she’s _not_ okay. He touches her hair, heaves a breath. Shampoo and bleach and ink and blood. He bends down, and presses his mouth to her scalp, because he can’t _not_ do that, he wants so desperately to kiss her but there’s no way he ever can, so he does this instead, and she sighs a bit. Her heartbeat skitters a little, like she’s surprised. “Like I said,” he says into her hair. “You’re shit at lying.”

“Shut your mouth.” She squeezes his hand affectionately, and leans away from him. He lets her go. She doesn’t release his hand. Her fingers are trembling just a hair too much for her to be able to feel the tension in his hand, in his palm. The puffiness around his knuckles. Then she turns her face away from him, and he leans his hip hard into the bedside table. “Foggy, seriously. I’m not dropping the case.”

Foggy looks at him like he’s a traitor when Matt tells them to leave her alone. And he means what he says, he does. She can make her own decisions. She always has, and she always will. Besides, she’s tired. They’re all tired, but she’s sitting in a hospital bed and hurting and there’s no reason for them to be bothering her about this right now. He knows that they’re trying to head her off at the pass, but he also knows she’s already made up her mind, and they’re not going to be able to change it. (— _they threatened my friends,_ she’d said, _people that matter to me. I want him gone. But I want him scared of me,_ and he’s known for years that Darcy has a vicious streak but not quite like that, like the hiss of a sidewinder before it strikes—) And he knows, too, what they don’t. He knows Goodman and his men won’t touch her, not again. He _knows_ it.

He’ll make sure of it.

She checks out of Metro-General a few hours later. Matt can smell hints of Claire in these halls, dabs of her, and it’s a clash of night and dark that makes his skin prickle. Darcy stands straight and doesn’t limp, though he can hear the way her teeth are grinding together from the effort of it. Foggy follows Darcy and Jen out onto the sidewalk to make sure they get in a cab all right, leaving Matt and Karen to stand near the doors. Karen heaves a shaky breath, and her eyelashes flutter. “God,” she says. “Is she always that—”

She stops.

“Stubborn?” Matt says.

Karen shakes her head. Then she clears her throat, blushing. “Uh, no.”

“Pig-headed?”

“Reckless,” Karen says quietly. Matt wonders, in that moment, what Karen’s definition of _reckless_ is, if her own careless race for the flash drive counts. He thinks, somehow, that when it comes to herself, Karen’s more likely to count it as _necessary_. He closes his hands around his cane. She’s watching him, waiting for an answer, patiently. She’s a study of soft and hard, this woman, vanilla shampoo and iron beneath the skin. She smells like Darcy and Jen’s apartment. He wonders why she decided to stay behind with him, why she decided to wait, instead of just going back with them.

“Thought you were on her side.”

She shakes her head again, her hair dancing across her shoulders. “I am. At least—at least if we know she’s doing it, we can make sure she’s not left alone.”

He blinks. Karen doesn’t notice. She looks down—at her hands or the ground, he’s not sure—and then sighs again. Foggy’s having a whispered shouting match with Jen about whether or not Darcy should be left on her own for the afternoon.

“Has Foggy told you the cafeteria story?”

Karen tips her head at him. “No. What’s the cafeteria story?”

“Freshman year. Guy used to treat Foggy like shit. Don’t know why.” He can remember the way it had felt to knock the bastard’s feet out from under him, late on a frosty December night, pin him down and say _lay off Franklin Nelson or you won’t be so lucky next time_. But it had been a long few months before that point, longer than he cares to remember. “I think he thought it was funny. Used to call him all these names, steal things from him. Foggy tried to keep it a secret from both of us, because he didn’t want either of us targeted. Me because I’m so fragile, emotionally—” he says it wryly enough that Karen snorts, which is what he’d been aiming for, so, success “—and Darcy because he really wasn’t sure what would happen, if he came after Darcy.”

“Because she’s small?” Karen says, and there’s an edge in her voice that might be a warning. Matt shakes his head.

“No, because we weren’t sure what _Darcy_ would do. She went after a guy she knew once, boyfriend of one of her coworkers. Laid him out flat, one punch. He must have had a hundred pounds on her, but she got right up in his face and told him that if he ever came near Zeke again, she’d do a hell of a lot worse. And he believed her, because when she gets really angry, you _always_ believe her. It’s not a question. She’s—very intimidating.”

“I can believe that.”

“But this guy, the one who was messing with Foggy—he noticed her and Foggy hanging out in the cafeteria one day, came over. Said all these terrible things, according to Darcy. Foggy won’t talk about any of the things he called them. I think it bothers him. But Darcy stood up and _went_ for him. She didn’t even say anything, just went for his eyes. Foggy had to drag her away before anything happened. It’s a miracle she wasn’t suspended.”

Karen breathes for a moment or two. The taxi door slams, the engine guns. It slips away into New York traffic. Foggy stands and waits until it’s around the corner, hands in his pockets.

“She doesn’t stop,” Matt says. The words taste strange in his mouth. “With bullies. If they come after her, if they come after someone she cares about, someone she thinks is vulnerable, she doesn’t stop. She pushes back. It’s what she’s always done. She’s not reckless. She sees something wrong, and she deals with it. It's dangerous as hell, sure. But it's not that she doesn't weigh the risk. She just doesn't care if she gets hurt in the process.”

Neither of them say anything for a moment. Karen’s watching him again. Then she clears her throat, and hooks her purse back up over her shoulder. “I should go and sit with her. Make sure she stays put until she can, you know. At least walk properly.”

“And we,” Foggy says, coming up between them, “should head back to the office. Court waits for no man. Or hospital.”

Matt hums.

“You okay?” Foggy touches his fingers to Matt’s elbow. “You look kinda pale.”

“It’s nothing,” Matt says easily. “I just don’t like being in hospitals.”

“Oh, yeah. Forgot.” Foggy pauses, like he’s about to ask something. Then he shakes his head. “C’mon. Karen, you want to cab back with us?”

“Sure, it’ll be cheaper.”

That night he stops three men at the top of the alley near Darcy’s window, and informs them in no uncertain terms that they are to _stay the hell away from here._ And when they ignore him, he shows them. It should make him feel better, but it doesn’t. The sound of Karen’s silence is tugging at him, making him wonder. _Maybe it should be her I’m careful of, instead of Jen._

Karen’s sharper than he thought she was, and he can’t afford to be puzzled out. Not now, not ever.

He makes sure Darcy’s still asleep before he goes, and the sound of the nightmares chases him all the way down to the waterfront.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The guy Matt's talking about, the Columbia bully, has a bit part in _The Man without Fear._ Matt beats the shit out of him one night and he leaves Foggy alone after that. It's, uh. It's a Matt way of handling things, that's for sure.


	3. Confessions - Stairwell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: Recovering from injuries, discussion of assault, discussion of blood, bruising, and broken bones, discussion of violence and violent impulses, basically just smack a _You've been watching **Daredevil**_ sticker over all of this and you'll know what you're in for.
> 
> Apparently writing Matt POV is addicting, because I seriously _cannot stop_. Even though every time I write him all I can think is _Good God, you overdramatic self-loathing loser, why do I love you this much?_ Because he's such a dramatic little shit, I swear to god. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed, as always.

Foggy at least waits until the door’s shut behind her before he swears under his breath, and works his fingers into his hair. “ _Jesus_. She’s going to get herself hurt.”

Matt says nothing. He can’t say anything, because if he speaks, they’ll hear his voice shaking. Karen makes a noise in the back of her throat. “She can take care of herself, Foggy.”

“I’m not saying she can’t, that wasn’t what I meant. I meant that—God, how do I say this without sounding like an asshole?” He looks to Matt, and then away again. Matt rests a loose fist against his mouth. _Keep it closed, Murdock._ “I’m saying that if she keeps acting like nothing’s happened they’ll be able to go after her again, and this time they might actually, you know.”

He makes a noise that sounds nothing like a slit throat. It still makes Matt flinch.

“She can go and get coffee and come back, Foggy, it’s not that big of a deal.”

“…I just keep digging a hole and I don’t know what I’m saying that put me there.”

“Oh,” Karen says, and she blinks. “She forgot her phone.”

“See!” Foggy sounds close to hysterical. “See, this is the shit I was talking about! Get beaten up in an alley, say _no, Foggy, I’ll be fine on my own, don’t be such a patriarchal asshole, Foggy, just let me forget my fucking phone!_ ” He snatches the phone off the desk, and the bell chortles against his fingers. “God, I’m seriously going to—”

“I’ll take it,” Matt says suddenly. Foggy stops, and does that thing where he reboots, like he’s a computer stuck on one line of code. He shakes his head and purses his lips and rolls his eyes all at once. “She’ll yell at you, if you go.”

Foggy huffs. “And she won’t yell at you?”

“He wasn’t the one who was acting like she couldn’t get a cup of coffee without a squad of bodyguards,” Karen says, and yeah. Karen’s definitely picked her side in this. Matt would thank her for it, if it wasn’t not helping in the slightest.

“She’s probably gone already,” is what Foggy says instead, but he smacks the phone into Matt’s hand. “Give her this too, will you? She’s gonna do that thing where she buys coffee for everyone and waves off money after. She always does that.”

“Oh,” Karen says again. “I can—”

“Nah, I can pay for you, it’s okay.” Foggy coughs. “Or you can owe me, whatever. Go, Matt.”

“Yeah.” Matt curls his fingers around the phone and the money. “Okay.”

She’s already halfway down the stairs by the time he gets out of the office, ignoring his cane in favor of pressing his hand to the wall. He doesn’t need to, but he’s not sure he’ll be able to stand up straight, otherwise. He’d pushed too hard last night, snapped his body around too much. The gash in his side is pounding like an anvil. “Darcy.”

She whirls, and she’s already snarling. “What part of _I’ll be okay_ —”

God, he wants to shout at her. _You can’t know that._ Because she _can’t_ know that, no one can know that, and as hard as he tries he can’t always be there. He _won’t_ always be there. It’s not something he can do, really. He’s trying to save the city, not just one woman. No matter who she is. And fuck, he wants—he doesn’t even know anymore, what he wants. And so he holds the phone out, instead.

“Cell phone. And you forgot to grab money for the drinks.”

Air hisses through her teeth. She sags a little as she bounces back up the stairs, and she shouldn’t _do_ that, not with her rib the way it is. ( _Well, that’s hypocritical of you, isn’t it,_ says a voice in his head. It sounds a lot like Claire. _Considering your own broken ribs. And the hole in your side, like, damn. Such a hypocrite._ ) “Sorry,” she says, and her voice is still just a little bit hoarse, though he doubts anyone could hear it but him. It’s been a week, and it’s _still_ hoarse. (—and if there’s one thing he regrets it’s not hurting them more, Goodman’s men, not hurting them as badly as he wanted to, but he’s been trying so hard to keep that part of him leashed, and he couldn’t have broken them the way he’d been longing to, not with her there to see it, because god, if she ever finds out she’d loathe him, and he can’t stand the thought of it, can’t bear it, though Christ knows he deserves it for what he’s done—) “Shouldn’t have snapped.”

The bell rings as she pushes the phone and the money into her back pocket. Usually it’s impossible to separate her from that thing, so he’s not entirely sure how she could have forgotten it. Although, he thinks, she _had_ been arguing at the time. He thinks she’ll turn and leave, then, but she pauses, standing on the balls of her feet, and huffs out a laugh.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. Her earrings scrape against her throat. “All of us look like shit but Foggy. It’s like—I don’t know. I feel like it’s just a matter of time before someone punches him in the face.”

 _Not if I can help it_. He knows she’s joking, but he doesn’t think he could take Foggy enduring this, too.

“Come to think of it,” Darcy adds, “I might be the one to do the punching.”

It startles him so much that he has to laugh. It makes the crack on the inside of his cheek ache to do it, but he laughs anyway. Because of course that’s what she meant. She doesn’t want Foggy hurt any more than he does. He’s pretty sure she’d throw herself in the way if anyone tried. Actually, she’d probably try to claw their face off. He thinks that’s part of what draws him to her so much, that streak of protective violence. Though it does bite her in the ass on occasion, because for god’s sake, she tries to save _everyone_ and it’s going to kill her someday. He hears a scab crack when she smiles, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Darcy wraps her arms around herself for a moment, like she’s trying to hide something. She’s watching him, and he lets her. “Jesus,” she says, and then she reaches out, and touches her finger to his chin. He doesn’t have to force himself to flinch. Every time she touches him, it makes him jump. “Your stairs really hate you, how did this even happen?”

 _Stairs?_ he thinks, but then he remembers. His side aches. “I think it’s more my feet that are the problem than the stairs,” he tells her, and he refuses to think of the Russians, of the boy in the locked room, the silence, because it’ll show on his face. Matt moves without thinking about it, curling his fingers around her wrist, tugging her hand away. He can feel her pulse against his thumb, and it’s soothing. “You okay?”

She scoffs. “I’m fine. Your feet are dumb.” Darcy pulls away from him, and then prods at his wrist with her fingertips. It makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle uncontrollably, like someone’s snuck up behind him and is blowing on his ear. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she says, and his mouth dries up.

(— _the scream and the knife and the sound of blood on the sidewalk, the way her heart was pounding—_ you leave them alone, you son of a fucking bitch—)

“I heard from the doctor about how bad you look.” Not technically a lie. He hadn’t actually _spoken_ to the doctor, but he’d heard them talking, during his wait for Jen in the lobby. He’d been listening too hard not to. “Besides, it’d probably just hurt if I—not a good idea.”

He _wants_ to touch her, though, which is the sick part. He knows which parts of her are broken, but there’s a difference between knowing and actually seeing it, the best way he can, tracing the marks out with his fingers so he knows exactly what he has to do to Goodman, in the end. And that’s sick, too, in its own way, but this kind of sickness—it’s the kind that makes the darkest parts of him curl up and snarl.

“Just take your dumb glasses off, Murdock,” she says, teasing, and shakes her hair back out of her face. She winces right after, and if _that_ hurts, a week later, Jesus. _All of it,_ he thinks. _All of it and worse, with Goodman._ If he can manage it. “I’m giving you permission to touch my face. You know how many guys would kill for this chance? And you get it for free.”

He can’t help it. Matt pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes, just for a moment. The nosepiece of his glasses jams into his forehead. Because _Christ_ , half the time he thinks she knows exactly what she does to him, saying things like that, and the rest—he doesn’t know. “The ICU doctor said that the only reason your cheekbone didn’t fracture was because you went with the punch, instead of against it,” he says, and he is _not_ thinking about the first time she’d offered to let him study her face, because that was years and years ago, and she’d done it so casually he hadn’t even hesitated. He’d been eighteen and so fucking stupid, completely unaware of what any of it meant, the need to be around her, and remembering it now is like the sting of a sunburn. Then it comes back to him, the raw fury, because some bastard paid a scumbag to hurt her, and she doesn’t even seem to realize how much worse it could have been. (But she has to know, she’s smart enough, and he doesn’t know what it means, that she doesn’t seem to be thinking about it. Maybe she’s just not letting herself. The alternative is that she actually trusts the devil to keep her safe, and god, he won’t go down that path right now, he _won’t_.) “I don’t want to make anything worse.”

She purses her lips, sighs through her nose. _Impatient,_ he thinks. That or frustrated. He’d put money on the second one. “Matt, seriously. You’re not going to hurt me. You have butterfly hands.” And that’s the most hilarious fucking thing he’s ever heard, but he keeps quiet, because she’s reaching out again, touching his shoulder this time, lightly. “And mostly this is an excuse because I still haven’t seen your bruises. So I’m going to steal your glasses, okay?”

 _No,_ he thinks, but he bites his tongue. He wears his glasses for a reason—not just because he needs to, not just because he knows how people feel when he takes them off, unsettled, nervous, unsure of what to say. Because he needs them to keep himself in the moment. He never wears his glasses, when he’s out at night. He hides his eyes, but he never wears his glasses, and the clear delineation—glasses, or none—helps him keep things straight, sometimes. As if he’s dividing himself into two people, even though he knows he’s not. Even though the devil is always creeping out of him, it helps him keep up the pretense better. Darcy stands there, waiting, her hand not leaving his shoulder, and he forces himself to uncoil, forces his muscles to relax, because Christ. It’s just Darcy. “Okay.”

She cants her head at him, curious. “Okay?”

 _Always have to check, don’t you?_ “Okay,” he says again, and Darcy shifts a step, coming closer. There’s no point to closing his eyes, but he does it anyway, holding himself very still, because there’s nothing else he can manage, right now. Darcy draws her fingers up his shoulder, and sets her thumb to his cheek in a warning before she draws the glasses off. It’s gentle, but not delicate, and when she hooks them through the top of her shirt, he’s barely breathing. She’s _never_ delicate with him, and never has been, and that might be what made him come back to her, especially in the beginning. She’s been careful, but she’s never been delicate, and it was addicting even then. Now it’s—it’s more than soothing and less than comforting, some space in between that keeps him steady. And when the hell did his sanity get so wrapped up in another person, in their welfare, in their everything? When in God’s name did he get caught so deeply in this—this absolute cacophony of a human being, highs and lows and fierce, in-your-face, take-it-or-leave-it vivacity? He really can’t remember, and it doesn’t scare him. Not like it should. Not like it ought to.

 _We can’t be like them, Matty,_ Stick says in the back of his mind, but no. _Fuck you._ He doesn’t want to be the sort of man Stick wanted. He doesn’t know that he _can_ be. No matter what horrors lurk in his head, he’s determined not to fall that far. No matter how much he might want to, sometimes.

He’s not sure what he does, but something makes her breathing catch. Maybe it’s the bruises. She feathers her fingertips over the edge of his black eye, touches the split in his eyebrow. “Don’t fall down the stairs again, okay?” Her voice trembles a little. “It’s not a good look for you.”

He wonders what she’d do if she could see the rest of it, the bandages and the breaks. He doesn’t speak. She wavers, like she’s going to draw away; then she rests her fingertips against his cheek again. It’s not exploratory, just—affection, he thinks. Concern. He tips his head into it, and when she pushes her palm against his jaw, it’s like a gift. _A negative cycle._ A reward for bad behavior. He’s being too needy, but he can’t pull away.

She’s watching him again, head cocked, curious. Her hair scuffs against her earrings again. “You okay?”

Matt blinks, because he can’t help it. There’s something curling in her, now, like—like a cobra. It’s terrifying and alluring all at once, and he shifts closer, because he can’t not. _Violence calls to violence._ He can’t romanticize her, not when she’s like this. Because even though she’s not drenched in blood, she has the potential for it, the inclination, and he’ll kill himself before he lets her destroy everything about her that’s good. He won’t survive his devil. And she’s always been better than him. He doesn’t want to have her fall through his fingers.

“I’m fine.” He can smell blood, old and fresh colliding. She’s bleeding somewhere, he just doesn’t know where. He clears his throat, trying to shake it, but the scent won’t go away. “You’re the one who had the crap kicked out of you.”

“And I have the bruises to show for it,” she says, smiling, but the cobra part of her is still there, lurking. Then the scab on her mouth cracks all the way open, and she winces. “Ow.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing.” Darcy draws her hand away, catches his. She presses his palms to her shoulders. Her collarbone feels very fragile, and he realizes with a jolt of nausea that he knows exactly how much pressure it would take to break them. _God, no._ “Just my lip. See?”

Christ. _Christ._ “Darcy—”

“Matt.” She rests one hand over his, and squeezes his fingers. “Seriously. Shut up and touch my face.”

She’s going to kill him. “I don’t—”

“I told you, butterfly hands.” And he can feel his resistance crackling, disintegrating. He clears his throat again, unable to help himself. “Besides, I know you. You’ll stress until you know how bad it is, and it’s probably not nearly so terrible as you’re thinking. I don’t bruise all that easy.”

(—the noise she makes when she hits the ground, strangled and terrified, and doesn’t she realize that by saying that she’s telling him exactly how bad it was, how frightened she was, how furious, because he could practically _feel_ it coming off her, the rage, the way her hands shook and her nails dug deep into her palms as if she was trying to find someone to strike—)

 _You,_ he thinks to himself, _are dead._ Because he can never say no to her. Matt draws back, just for a moment. Then he touches one finger to her collarbone (she hisses like he’s burned her, and he moves on quickly, but he had to do it, touch a part of her that isn’t bruised or broken or bleeding, just to reassure himself that they still exist, to remind himself that he won’t hurt her even though his hands are so torn with violence). Her earrings tickle, synthetic feathers and sterling silver. The scrape of the scab makes him pause, because he’d known, logically, that they had a knife to her throat—he’d _heard_ it, and Foggy had said things, and Darcy had dropped a few off-color jokes about it, as if it was something funny even as her heart skipped a beat every time she did it—but there’s a difference between knowing and _feeling_ it. They’d held a knife to her throat, and she’d bled. And Christ, doing this, going along with it, it was a terrible idea, but he can’t stop. Not now. “Knife?”

She swallows a little. “Yeah.”

Matt draws back. It’s easier to pick out the deeper bruising if he’s touching her full on, and he doesn’t think he can manage that. Not right now. She’s almost unnaturally still as he traces the lines of her bones, the puffiness stinging deep inside him like a raw wound. The doctor had been right, back in the ICU. He can feel the fragility in her cheekbone, still, even when he’s barely touching her. _So, so close._ Scabs and splits and gaping places, blood pooled beneath the skin. A distant part of him is wishing he’d done so much worse, wishing that he’d given in and visited the hospital again, silent and black and unforgiving. But the largest part of him is rooted to the ground, torturing himself. Every new mark rams into him like a blade. _This is what you didn’t stop_.

His skin is crawling by the time he’s done. Matt flexes his fingers, tries to wipe the feeling away. It doesn’t work. It’s like ants are marching inside his hands. Darcy rocks in place, a nervous habit. “So, was it as bad as you thought it was?”

Better. Worse. So much worse. “Darcy. Jesus.”

She wavers again. Then she nods once. “Hey.” She steps up and into him, gingerly. It always surprises him, how free she is with this. His father was never a hugging person, and Stick—god. He really doubts Stick has ever considered touch to be anything other than a weapon. He lifts a hand to her hair, because it’s safe to touch her there, it’s platonic, it truly is, she’s always asking people to pet her hair and it doesn’t mean anything in particular if he does it more often than Foggy does. (He’s a liar. He knows he’s a liar. But he’ll keep telling himself this, because it’s the only thing that holds him back, sometimes.) He can feel her heartbeat against his ribs, and when she says, “I’m okay,” her voice shivers into him and stays there. He closes his eyes.

“No, you’re not.”

“I think I get to decide whether I’m okay or not, Murdock.” And all of a sudden he wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, because _god._ It’s been a week and he still can’t help it. _You could have died,_ he thinks. _They could have killed you because you’re so damn stubborn,_ and he wants to shout at her until she gets it, because he’ll be damned if he can’t keep her safe, but the world hates him, and if something else happens to her and he can’t get there, if they come after her again while he’s too far away to stop it, god, he’s terrified of it, and if he’s this wrecked now when she’s alive and mostly whole and he can feel her against him, always softer than he anticipates, what would happen to him if she actually—

“—seriously fine,” she says, and he snaps back into the moment again. “I’m just—” She stops, bites her tongue. “I don’t like feeling helpless,” Darcy says finally, and he wants to shake her all over again. “That’s all.”

“It shouldn’t have happened.” He’s saying it to himself more than anything, because _where the hell were you, Murdock?_ He can’t be everywhere, he knows that, logically, mentally, but the rest of him isn’t logical, not about her. Her hands press into the small of his back, and it aches. “You shouldn’t have had to get hurt.”

“C’est la vie, Matthew.” She draws a deep breath in, and lets it out. It tickles at his collar. “I’m okay, I really am. So don’t worry about me, all right?”

She shifts, from one foot to the other, and he’s so tired of pretending. He doesn’t realize how close he’s pulled her until she squeaks, and at the last possible moment he remembers her fractured rib. He drops his hand to her hip, instead, because he can’t help it, he _can’t_ , he can’t ever explain how badly frightened he was when he realized _god, that’s Darcy and if I don’t get there in time_ — He’ll catch hell for it later, from his conscience, from his monsters, but he doesn’t care. _I hate this_ , he realizes, suddenly. He hates lying to them, even if he has to. He hates lying to all of them, but he loathes lying to her. She nearly died, but she’s here, he can feel her breathing, and she presses closer into him like she’s searching for something. His head is spinning in circles, a twisted carousel veering between reality and imagination, and if he loses her it might destroy him, it really, truly might. He has no idea what he’d do if she died and he couldn’t stop it, and even the thought of it makes his stomach bottom out and the devil curl through his blood, _burn the world to the ground_ —

“Tell me the truth this time,” she says, and he snaps to attention. Her mouth is dangerously close to the pulse in his throat. He can feel her lips moving, if he focuses hard enough,. *Are you okay?”

God, no. No, he’s not okay. He’s not anywhere close to okay. He’s going out every night and ripping people to shreds because it’s the only way he can imagine making the world better, and what’s worse is that he loves every minute of it. She could have died, and it could have been so much worse, he _knows_ that, but she nearly died, and he couldn’t live with himself if she had. But he can’t say that, any of it, so he just breathes her in for a minute or two. She’s always steadied him out, and she has no clue. _God, she’d hate me if she knew._ “I don’t know.” It’s the closest he can get to the truth without crossing the line. “I don’t—know.”

She shifts, and he hears her eyes close. Her fingers curl into his shirt, nails scraping against the fabric. For a second, he lets himself imagine that it’s because she’s trying to keep him here. “Because of the case with Healy?”

He shakes his head, and says nothing. Darcy breathes, in and out, and he matches her without thinking about it. Then she draws her hand up his back, tugs her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck, and god. When was the last time he’d let her touch him like this? Not since—Jesus, not since the bar exam. He’s been so careful since they took the bar. _One fake mugging and all your promises are worth exactly shit to you, aren’t they?_ “I don’t know,” he says again, and this time it’s closer to the truth. “I don’t think so.”

_Fucking liar._

She breathes, slowly. Her pulse is faster than he remembers. Like she’s worried, or she’s frightened. _God, I’m scaring her._ But he can’t pull away. “Okay.” She presses her cheek closer to his shoulder, scrapes her nails over his scalp again. “You don’t have to know. It’s okay not to be okay.”

Everything in him snaps. He blinks once, twice. He can’t speak. He just shifts until she’s pressed as close as he can get her, and sets his cheek to her hair, trying to catch every hint of her. _It’s okay not to be okay._ She has no idea how much she ruins him, how much she saves him. But it’s only for a moment, because if he holds on to her for too long, he’ll forget that he can’t.

She grabs his hand as he lets her go, and he freezes, but it’s only because she’s settling his glasses back into his palm. He has to fight not to clear his throat again. “Thanks.”

“Matt.” He stops, about to draw away, because her fingers curl tight around his, nearly crushing the glasses between them, the line between his lives. _Our lives are rife with metaphor_ , he thinks, and he nearly laughs at himself, because _god, don’t be so dramatic, Matty._. “You don’t have to know. And you don’t have to tell me. But I’m here, if you need me. Okay?”

 _Don’t say that._ He’ll take her at her word, because she’s never lied to him, really. Never mentioned some things, certainly, but she’s never lied, and she means what she says now, he can hear it in her heartbeat, in her steady breathing, in the way she watches him without blinking, waiting for a response. _God, don’t say that, you don’t know what you’re offering._ He closes his hand tight around her fingers until he can feel her bones, and then he makes himself let go. Darcy steps back, coughing a little, fiddling with her bag.

“I’ll be back in a bit, okay? I’ll call you guys if anything happens.”

It tears out of him before he can stop it. “Darcy,” he says, and she stops immediately, turning on the stairs, cocking her head. She squeezes the straps of her bag.

“Yeah?”

 _I wish I could tell you,_ he thinks. He almost says it. _I wish I could tell you the truth._ He doesn’t, but he does. If any of them could understand it—and they can’t, he knows they won’t; they’re better people than he is, Foggy and Darcy, they’d never really understand it—it might be her. And if she says things like that again, if she keeps pushing, he’ll believe her. He’ll fuck up, he’ll show her something or do something or give himself away, and he can’t afford to tell her, not ever. He can’t afford to lose them, so he’ll keep lying until it destroys them all.

He can’t say a word. But it’s _her,_ so he wants to.

“It’s nothing.” He takes a step back. “Never mind.”

He wishes so badly he could close his ears to the way she’s breathing, like she’s been punched in the ribs.

Karen’s standing in the office when he slips in through the door again, hands tight around a file. She’s been watching him lately. He’d think it was because of a crush, if it weren’t for the way she keeps twisting her mouth, like she’s trying to figure something out. “Hey,” she says. “She okay?”

“She’s fine.” Matt touches his hand to the wall, and Karen shifts out of his way. “I’m going to go make sure Healy made it out of the station okay. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Karen shifts a little. “You want company?”

“Nah. Rather not have to make either of you deal with that sleazeball.” He finds his jacket draped over his desk. Karen trails after him. “I’ll be back.”

“Okay.”

She’s still watching him as he leaves the office, shutting the door very carefully behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You think you're being all slick with hiding how much you love her, Matt, but you're really not, and Karen figured it out ages ago. 
> 
> So I'm deliberately posting some of these scenes out of order, depending on my muse, what part of TPoW is haunting me the most, and extasiswings being an instigator and throwing images in my face. Also, because I like out-of-order things in regards to timelines. I couldn't do it with TPoW for obvious reasons, but I can fully satiate my weirdass addiction here, so buckle up, buttercups.


	4. Feathers of Lead - Kiss

“Matt,” she says, and her voice cracks. “Kiss me.”

The world whites out. Just for a moment, there’s nothing, like when the police had found him and Vladimir, and the universe had turned to viscous amber. He can hear the cops coming, he can hear their footsteps, but through a thick wad of cotton, and it’s all he can do to just _breathe_. For a split second he can’t even do that much. He turns his head towards her. “What?”

“The cops are coming, I’m not blonde, and you look like a vigilante. _Shut up and kiss me._ ”

He can focus, now. He still hears the police, still can hear everything else, but it’s just like that moment in undergrad. She’s drowned out the rest of it. There’s something about the way she’s clenched her hands right now that’s familiar, something about the way her heart’s beating that he recognizes. It’s an echo to everything he’s been hearing for years and never quite been able to explain, and just for a single, insane second, he thinks, _maybe this is just as hard for her_. And then the thought vanishes, because if that’s true he’s been lying to himself for years, and he _knows_ he lies to himself but he can’t have possibly been that stupid. Matt swallows once, twice. “I don’t—uh.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” she says, exasperated, like he’s being silly about something, and then before he can work up the ability to move she’s there, she’s _right_ there, and it’s done. It’s more like a car accident than a kiss, since she crashes right into him and doesn’t seem to notice if it hurts, but it’s done, and he can’t breathe. If he breathes in then he’ll—he doesn’t even know what. He’ll be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

He needs to pull back. This is invasive and twisted and _god_ , he needs to pull back. She doesn’t _know._ She’s never known. He’s never let her know. And she’s kissing him because it’s a distraction and he gets that and he should be paying attention to the rest of the world, but he can’t help it. Her eyes are closed like she’s trying not to look at him, and when she pushes his mask off it’s after she’s drawn her hands from his chest to his shoulders and up his throat to keep track of where he is in space and Jesus _Christ_ , he’s either going to run or going to stay and he doesn’t know which is worse. He keeps his hands away, keeps his breathing shallow, but he can still taste her on his tongue, and when she pushes him back, one, two, three, she draws away from him just for a moment and her mouth coasts over his jaw and _Jesus Christ_.

“Darcy,” he starts to say, _Darcy, stop, Darcy, please, please stop, you have no idea and I don’t want you to hate me and please, god, stop_ but then her mouth is on his again and he realizes that even if he wanted to, he can’t pull away now. The police are close, now, closer than he realized. A few yards from the top of the alleyway.

 _An unrequited kiss_ , he thinks, in what little part of him is capable of thinking (it’s the oddest feeling because he’s so used to thinking about _everything_ , even if it’s habit, he thinks about every move he makes, every move the world makes, calculating and analyzing _everything_ , but now he can’t think, he can’t think, he can’t even _breathe_ ) and it’s so goddamn pathetic. It’s not a real kiss if only one person wants it to be a real kiss, but for god’s sake, she tastes like coffee and cinnamons and her last cigarette, and her mouth is puffy like she’s been biting it. He feels her heartbeat like it’s his own pulse from this close, and it’s so fast. It’s _so_ fast. _Why is it so fast?_

Then she bites him, and his hands are on her waist without him even realizing he’s moved, and the cops are coming, and goddammit. God _dammit_. He keeps his hands loose and his body as far away from hers as possible as he leans into it, and her mouth is like everything he thought it would be, more, the dampness on her lips and the way she pushes into it, like she’s trying to turn it into a fight. She makes an irritated little sound, and god. He never lets himself think it but he loves her, he doesn’t even know why anymore, he could rationalize it before, understand it before, but now it’s so much a part of him that it should be tacked onto his name, _I’m Matt Murdock and I’m in love with Darcy Lewis_ , who is so far beyond him that they should be in different universes.

 _You have no right to tell me who I am,_ she’d said to Stick, to _Stick_ , who never lets anyone speak to him like that, and even if she hates him now he’ll remember that moment forever, because he’d been so goddamn proud of her it had actually been physically painful. _You have no right to tell me who I am or what I can do._ And Stick, muttering, _should’ve figured it was because of a goddamn woman_ , and he can still taste the fury in the back of his throat.

And then her fingers curl into the collar of his shirt and for a heartbeat, two, he remembers the way her fingers had felt on his cheek and the way her breathing had stuttered when she’d said _because someone else I care about was being beaten into the ground every night, and I didn’t see it_ , and for a moment, just for that moment, he’d thought he’d tasted something in the air that he’d never noticed before (or noticed so often that it turned into nothing), a feeling, a sense, a _maybe_ —

“Matt,” she says, half a breath, and everything breaks. He can’t feel her the way he wants to, not through the gloves, but he clings, rests one palm against the back of her neck where he knows her hair is tangled, and he’s intoxicated, coffee and cigarettes and cinnamon, the warmth and wetness of her mouth. Darcy makes another tiny sound, not surprised, but _needy_ , and digs her fingernails into his hair like she’s trying to knot them there. And that, in and of itself, is a reckoning, because she shouldn’t be doing that. Not in an unrequited kiss.

The ground opens up and swallows him, because _what if he’s wrong_ —

The cops are at the top of the alley, three of them, and one of them spits and mutters “motherfucker” as they pause, but that’s all white noise—

“Matt,” she says again, into his mouth, the word pressing up against his tongue and teeth, and he’s pretty sure she doesn’t even know she’s done it. It’s so soft, barely audible for her, but to him it’s a gunshot, a bursting grenade. He wants his gloves off but he can’t manage it without breaking the kiss. Matt leans back against the wall and draws her further forward, and her hair is tangled all around her when he slides his hands into it, and this is what he never lets himself think of, when he touches her, this is what he will _never_ let himself think of, not ever again, but just for this moment he can imagine, maybe, something like this. A whine cracks high in the back of her throat and he nearly combusts.

The cops are gone. But Darcy’s still there, and she’s breathing into him and it’s like cocaine, like a high, he’s so glad he has the wall because otherwise he’d be losing his balance, and when she presses even closer into him he uses it as a brace to lift her up onto her toes, and she’s still kissing him, _she’s still kissing him_ , and there’s a part of him that’s growing louder with every passing moment, because this shouldn’t still be happening.

_An unrequited kiss._

He tastes salt on the corner of her mouth. It’s a tear, maybe. He lifts his hands, sets his thumbs to her cheeks. The pulse in her throat is shivering inside her skin. Matt closes his eyes and draws away from her, just his mouth, and she doesn’t pull back. She’s still pressed so close that he can feel her heartbeat, feel every part of her, and she doesn’t pull back. Her eyelashes are damp when he rests two fingers to her jaw, swallows hard.

_That shouldn’t have happened in an unrequited kiss._

Darcy opens her eyes, and her breathing catches in her throat. And there’s heat and warmth pounding all through him, like agony, when she raises one hand, and puts two fingers to his mouth. He has to fight off the urge to touch them with his tongue.

“Um.” Her voice is _wrecked._ Her heart is still pounding. “Hi.”

 _It wasn’t an unrequited kiss_ , he thinks, and there’s something so expansive inside him that he wants to burst. Matt tips his head, and their noses touch, and god. _God._

“Hi _,_ ” he says, and he must be smiling like an idiot, but it’s beating through him, all the maybes, and she freezes. He can hear it when her breathing changes, hear all of it. A sudden flush of confusion, of fear. She draws back, and he lets her.

“I have to go,” she says, and she vanishes in the next moment. He stands there until he hears sirens, resting close against the wall.

His mouth tastes like coffee and cigarettes.

_What is an unrequited kiss, anyway?_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUYS I'VE CORRUPTED SOMEONE ELSE INTO WRITING DARECY 
> 
> PLEASE GO GIVE EXTASISWINGS LOTS OF LOVE AND KISSES AND TELL HER SHE'S AWESOME BECAUSE LAW SCHOOL BABIES


	5. Devil's Advocate - Knife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for: self-loathing, self-esteem issues, and Matt's Goddamn Catholic Guilt. 
> 
> FATHER P~~~~~
> 
> Unbeta'd, again, sorry.
> 
> Also TRAILER DROP TRAILER DROP TRAILER DROP

Foggy shuts the door with a sort of gentleness that stings more than if he’d slammed it screaming. Foggy never closes doors when he can kick them. This quiet departure, the way he closes the door so carefully that it barely makes a sound—that’s not just disappointment, that’s actual fear. Matt can hear it in the way his heart’s ticked up, the way he lets out a breath once the door is closed and keeps his eyes shut for a moment too long. He’s not sure if Foggy’s frightened because of the fight, or because of what’s at stake, or because he knows something he won’t say—it could be all three—but it’s…unsettling.

Then again, this whole day has been unsettling. The past _week_ has been unsettling. ( _You’re the devil of Hell’s Kitchen. You led me to Claire. You’re the one who beat the shit out of those guys in the alley. And you saved my life, and Karen’s. You’ve done all of that, and you never told me._ ) ( _I want to go with you. When you talk to Blake._ ) ( _The way his name tastes when it’s coming out of her mouth, tangled, her fingernails biting into the back of his head as he leans into the wall and draws her into him, and none of that should have happened in an unrequited kiss—_ ) Foggy being frightened—there could be a million reasons for it, but it knocks him off-balance, the unfamiliarity of it. Foggy’s never been frightened of him or Darcy before. _We can’t afford to be fighting amongst ourselves right now_ , he’d said, and he’d looked from Matt to Darcy and back again, like he does sometimes when he thinks neither of them are paying attention, like he knows something neither of them do. It’s possible he does, Matt realizes all at once. It’s possible Foggy’s always known. But he doesn’t—that can’t be possible.

(Pauses and significant looks and lies of omission—)

There’s a clatter, and Matt snaps back into himself. Darcy’s snagging all her things, shoving them into her bag. Her heart’s beating faster than usual. _She wants to get away from me_. It’s his first thought, and it hits him hard, but when he listens harder he can hear the way her teeth are grinding. She’s pissed, not frightened, but it still stings. She’s been leery of him all day, not saying a word, and he can’t blame her for that, not really, because he hasn’t said a word to her, either. He’s too much of a coward for that. And god _dammit,_ he should be better than this. But (— _her lips on his skin and her heartbeat racing, faster and faster, and if he’s been lying to himself this whole time then maybe, maybe, maybe—_ ) maybe he’s not, because in spite of everything, he doesn’t want her angry with him. He doesn’t want to be angry with her. “Where are you going?”

“To talk to Brett.” She bites the words as they leave her mouth, spitting them. Darcy holds her flick knife in her palm for a moment before tucking it under her shirt, and there’s a flicker of low approval in the back of his throat. He wants to claw it out of himself. _I shouldn’t need to be proud of her for that. She shouldn’t need to protect herself that way._ But the world is the way it is and he’s never sure if he’s making it worse or not, doing what he does. “I want to ask him if they looked into the Andromeda angle. If they haven’t, then we might have something.”

 _And you could die_ , he almost shouts, but he keeps his hands clenched behind the table and his voice steady when he says, “You could call him, y’know.”

“Yeah, I could.” Darcy lets out a thin hissing breath. “If I stay here any longer, though, I’m going to scream. And that would probably be bad.”

Clench and unclench. He breathes. Then he creeps closer, because she’s moving, shifting away, and if she goes, she’ll be walking right into the lion’s den, and he won’t be at her back. She’ll be leaving furious, and he _hates_ this, hates himself for making her feel like this, because this was precisely what he’d been trying to avoid, but it’s all spilled everywhere, now, and his secrets are eating away at everything he’d been trying to protect. “Because of me.”

Darcy scoffs. “Yeah, well, you being a hypocritical dick isn’t helping, I can say that much.”

Ouch. Though it’s…more accurate than not. _I never wanted to lie to you_ , he wants to say. He feels like he _should_ say it, feels like he should say it over and over until she hears it, until she understands. _I never wanted to lie to you. I hated lying to you. Out of all of it, I hated lying to you more than anything._ ( _Every time I saw him, I’d imagine how I’d kill him_ , she’d said, and he thinks Mickey’s father, he thinks of how it felt to have the man’s face cave under his knuckles, how it must have been to be fourteen and hiding a knife under your jacket and waiting on a doorstep for an evil man to come home, the way it would feel to turn the knob and have it thwart you, and god, _Darcy Darcy Darcy_ , fury and fire and agony, _no one else has ever come close to understanding it and if anyone could_ —) He lets out a breath. “Yeah. Okay. I’m being a hypocrite.” He hears her shoulders shift, hears her rock on her feet, like she’s surprised. “But we all agreed,” he adds, because he can’t help himself, because he can’t not say it, “not to go anywhere alone. And walking right into the police station—which we already know is full of Fisk’s men—without backup or much of a plan is kind of suicide.”

“ _God._ ” She might want to punch him. He’s seen her punch people before, he knows what her temper sounds like. In all honesty, he kind of wants her to. It’d be easier to deal with than this quagmire of self-loathing and missteps. “I know that, okay? I’m just—”

Her breathing catches. Matt doesn’t realize how close he’s come until he hears how _ragged_ she gets, and something sparks in the back of his head, spiraling away, because _none of that should have happened if_ — When she clears her throat, he curls his fingers into a loose fist, for entirely different reasons. He wants to put his mouth to the skin of her throat and ask her to do it again, just so he can feel that sound. “Could you—Um.”

She’s actually blushing. She’s a tiny sun trapped in this room, heat radiating off her skin, and he’s tempted to take one more step, just one more step, to see what will happen if he does. But the fragile peace right now—that’s not something he wants to risk. “Could I what?”

She clears her throat again. When she shakes her head, her hair shifts over her shoulders. “Never mind. I’ll call Brett. Okay? Just—” Darcy swallows a few times, reflexively, the way she does when she’s trying to figure out what to say. “I know you’re, like, a super-badass fighter-dude, apparently, but you telling me I can and can’t do things is—it’s unacceptable. We’ve talked about this before when you were Mike, and we will talk about it again and again until it finally clicks, because I _will not be told what to do_. I’m not a kid, and even if I can’t, like—do a back-flip from a standing position, I know what I’m doing, and I’m not stupid.”

And she isn’t. That’s the worst thing about it, and the best. He knows that she’s not stupid, and he knows—he _knows_ —that she understands what it means, to be involved in all of this. But he still wants to bare his teeth and snarl, not at her but at the world, because he doesn’t want her to wind up hurt. Not because of him, not because of this, not because of her stubbornness and her bravery and all the rest of it. He can’t lose her. He _can’t_.

“And you,” she adds, completely unaware, “need to stop being so fucking reckless and going off on your own without telling anyone when you _said you wouldn’t._ You make us promise, you have to promise too. You go anywhere, you go out—patrolling, or whatever it is you do, _you tell me_. Okay?”

Matt opens his mouth, and closes it. _I can’t lose you_ , he wants to say. If she gets involved at this level, if she keeps looking into it, if she keeps _watching_ , there’s a very real possibility that she’ll get hurt. She could die, and he wouldn’t be able to live with that, getting her killed. But when he listens to her, when he listens to how she’s picking at a scab near her thumb, how she keeps looking at him and then away, like it hurts to see him for more than a moment—he thinks, maybe, that it’s the same for her. Why, he can’t even imagine. He doesn’t deserve worry like that. (She’ll kill him if he ever says that to her, he knows that, but he _doesn’t_. He’s a murder trapped in human skin, and he doesn’t deserve worry, not from her or from Foggy or from Karen or from anyone. They shouldn’t worry about him, not like this. If they worry too much they’ll get dragged into the dark with him, and he won’t let that happen to them, not them, not ever them. Not ever her.)

( _But some part of her is already in the dark,_ he thinks, he won’t let go of it, because there’s a _reason_ he knows she might be able to understand all of it, there’s a _reason_ for that and its name is Eli, it’s Eli’s father, it’s a knife and a locked door at midnight—)

His head hurts. Matt presses his fingers into his eyes, nodding once, only once. She can’t know how frightened he is. If she did, she wouldn’t be asking. But even as he thinks it, something’s unwinding, because he doesn’t have to lie anymore, not to her, at least. Darcy unclenches her hands and lets out a breath, licks her lips, and there it is again, the odd lurch in her breathing—

\-- _the wreckage of her voice, her fingers on his lips and her heartbeat, pulsing, too fast, much too fast_ —

(He won’t take her down with him, but god, he thinks about how it felt to touch her, and some part of him wants to—)

In the back of his head, the whispers start up again. _That should never have happened in an unrequited kiss_ , the realization that maybe he’s been wrong this whole time, maybe he’s _always_ been wrong, and he should ask, he knows that, he _knows_ that, but if he’s wrong and he asks then—

(Father Lantom in his head, sighing, his profile fractured through the latticework of the confessional. “It’s as human to love as it is to hate, Matthew. If you love this girl the way I think you do, she deserves to know that. If she’s anything like you’ve said, then she’d appreciate knowing the truth far more than what nominal comfort either of you get by you staying silent. Keeping it hidden—you can’t live the rest of your life with something like that trapped inside you. It’ll only ever turn sour.”

“You know why I can’t do that, Father.”

“I know why you think you can’t do that,” Father Lantom replies. “But you’ve said yourself: you’re an exceptionally talented liar, Matthew. You might want to think about that part.”)

“Um.” His brain crashes to a halt. Darcy shifts again, from foot to foot, and there’s that odd breath again, the pulse that he’s always discounted as nothing—but is it really nothing, _can_ it be nothing, can it be nothing after the alleyway? Can it be nothing now? He doesn’t think it’s nothing. “Can we not—um. I don’t like fighting with you. Can we not do that?”

 _I love you_ , he almost says. _God, I love you._ She should loathe him for what he’s done, but she’s still standing close, only just out of reach, and her voice—it doesn’t waver, exactly, but it’s certainly not steady. He wants to touch her, so badly it actually physically aches not to. He can’t touch her. Not now.

( _You’re an exceptionally talented liar, Matthew. You might want to think about that part._ )

“I don’t like fighting with you, either,” he says, and it’s the closest he can come to the truth today. It’s closer than he’d ever meant to come, even if it’s something so simple. Darcy lets out a little breath, and waits, though for what he’s not sure. He can read every microexpression but somehow they never seem to add up into a whole, with her. He reads scent and sound and movement, not minds, and whatever she’s thinking, it’s something he can’t know. She doesn’t say anything, she just watches him, hand clenched around her purse, waiting for something.

( _—the police are gone but she hasn’t pulled away and god, god, he can’t stop touching her—_ )

He’s a liar. He’s always been a liar. And he’s known, he’s _always_ known, that he can lie to himself as well as he can lie to anyone else. Matt presses a fist to his mouth, thinking hard. He should ask, he really should just ask, but god, the words won’t come. He _shouldn’t_ say anything, because if he tells her the truth, if through some—some act of God, some miracle, it turns out Father Lantom’s right, if it turns out she _does_ somehow have some kind of feeling for him, then Christ, he’d be lost. He’d never be able to keep her away, not after that. _I won’t be so selfish as to drag her deeper into this just because I love her._ But God, he _has to know._ If he _is_ wrong, if she _does_ feel something, then he has to know. He can’t—he won’t go on wondering if it really was an unrequited kiss.

“Well. Um. There’s that, then.” Darcy rocks back and forth again. Matt drops his hands. “I should probably go call Brett.”

“I think we need to talk,” he says, and his heartbeat is steady. “About what happened last night.”

Her heartbeat skips. She clenches her hand tight around the strap of her bag again, and swallows. _Not fear_ , he thinks, listening hard. _Not fear._ There’s an added edge to fear that isn’t present, not right now. Nervousness. Nervousness and something else, maybe. There’s a small part of him that wants it so, so badly to be hope. She breathes out. “You mean Blake?” she says, and her voice is husky, the words too fast. “Because I’m already guaranteed like fifty million years of therapy for everything that happened before I turned fifteen, so—”

“Darcy.”

She wavers. Then, slowly, she leans forward. It’s as if she’s being tugged with a magnet. “If you’re saying we should talk about it here,” she says, low, and something dances in the back of his throat, “then that is a very bad idea, for so many reasons, I can’t even—”

“No, not here.” God, not here. Not where someone could stop them. He hesitates. “I’d say my place, but that sounds like—well. It doesn’t sound very good.”

It sounds _desperate_ , is what it sounds like. (— _her mouth against his jaw and her fingers hooked into the collar of his shirt like she’s trying to hold him still_ —) It sounds like he’s expecting something when the only thing he wants is the truth, or something close to it. She doesn’t seem offended. She unwinds.

“No, your place is fine,” she says, simply. There’s something curling under the words, deep and pleased. Like she still trusts him even after he’s lied to her. He’s really not all that certain that she should. “After work maybe. Maybe before you go and act like Mephistopheles, though.”

 _I love you_ , he thinks again, for entirely different reasons. He’s pretty sure that only Darcy could make him laugh about what he does, like it’s something to laugh about. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

Darcy laughs. “I reserve full right to mock you about your weird nickname.”

“I didn’t actually pick it, y’know.”

“That’s what makes it so hilarious.” She opens her mouth, and shuts it again. The easiness vanishes. He can hear it when her eyebrows snap together, when she frowns, leaning back on one hip and just—watching him. Matt stays very still. _I have to know_ , he thinks, one last time, and decides.

“You okay?” He flexes his fingers against his thighs. “You went quiet.”

“Uh. Yeah. M’fine.” She coughs again, flushes again. “We should probably—deal with whatever’s going on out there.”

Matt tips his head. It’s not that hard to divide his attention between this room and the entryway without losing tack of her. He can hear Karen speaking Spanish, hear the scrape of Elena’s beaded purse. “It’s Mrs. Cardenas,” he says, and takes one step forward, two. Darcy doesn’t flinch away. “She’s come to tell us something about Tully.”

“We should—um.” She closes her eyes for a long moment, and her breathing goes wonky again. “We should go out and see what she has to say.”

“Yeah, probably,” says Matt, and he moves. He does it very slowly, or as slowly as he can manage, anyway, telegraphing it, making sure she can pull back. She doesn’t, though. She freezes when he takes her by the wrist, fingers loose, and her pulse is echoing like a drumbeat in the back of his head. He’s touching one of her tattoos, the one made of chains. She chokes a little when he swipes his thumb over it, but she doesn’t jerk away.

 _This isn’t normal._ He’s never done this, not with her. This isn’t normal, this isn’t platonic, this isn’t a lie, this is just—this moment, touching her, and she’s not pulling away.

“This is like…the worst possible time for this,” she says, a bit breathless, “isn’t it.” And it’s not a no. It’s not a yes, but it’s not a no. Matt starts to pull back— _at least you have your answer, now_ —but she twists around and seizes him by the wrist, her palm pressed against his heartbeat. It feels like she’s punched him in the head. “I mean.” Darcy clears her throat, and pushes her thumb into the bones of his wrist, drawing a line down them. “I’m still angry with you. And I feel like that should be more important. It should probably be more important, but—I don’t know.” She swallows, again and again and again. “Everything is mixed up right now.”

“You have a right to be angry with me.” Her lungs catch again. She’s _right_ to be furious with him. He’s lied to her, he’s always lied to her, and it’s a miracle they’re even still speaking. He strokes his thumb over her pulse point again, and then draws back, catches her hand. There’s the steam scar on her knuckles from Starbucks, marks from the fight in the alleyway, polish on her fingernails. She doesn’t yank away from him, even then, and that’s more than a miracle. He’s not sure what to call it. “If you need more time,” he says, “then we can wait. I mean it, Darcy. I’m guessing it’s—a lot to process.”

The devil. The monsters. _Because someone else I care about was being beaten into the ground every night, and I didn’t see it._ And that could mean anything, but he’s touching her and she’s not pulling away, she’s not forgiving him but she’s not vanishing like he’d always thought she would, and when he touches his fingers to her first knuckle, she closes her eyes like she’s trying to memorize the feel of it.

“Not as much as you’d think.” Matt stills. She’s always been able to read him much better than he ever remembers she can. “In a way, it makes the picture a lot clearer. Though—” her mouth curls up “—if I say I haven’t lost any sleep over it I’d be the worst bullshitter ever, and I’m in the legal profession.”

It’s meant to be a joke, but he can’t help it. “I’m sorry.” Because he never wanted to hurt her, he’s never wanted her to get hurt, but somehow she’s been hurt and he’s hurt her in spite of everything. ( _I know why you think you can’t do that. But you’ve said yourself: you’re an exceptionally talented liar, Matthew._ ) And God help him, he’s not lying anymore. He doesn’t know how to behave if he’s not lying. “I don’t know how I can say how sorry I am.”

She hums in the back of her throat. “I told you that sorries don’t fix things,” Darcy says, slowly. “But they help a lot.”

“Yeah.” He closes his eyes for a moment. He could live for millennium and never deserve even this small fragment of what could be forgiveness. “I remember.”

Darcy moves. He blinks his eyes open just in time to feel it when she rests her thumb to his brow, smoothing something away. She sets her teeth into her lower lip, hesitates. When he doesn’t pull back—as if he would, as if he _could_ —she strokes her fingers down his eyebrow, over his jaw. It’s like time’s turned back. _Don’t fall down the stairs again, okay? It’s not a good look for you._ But this time she doesn’t pull her hand back. She rests her fingers to his cheek and just watches him, just looks. It’s on the tip of his tongue. _I love you. Please stay._ Instead, he wets his lips, and says, “We really need to go and see what they’re talking about. Because otherwise I’m going to kiss you, and I feel like it’s going to set a bad precedent for office professionalism.”

The noise she makes then is the exact same desperate little sound she’d made when she’d kissed him, the exact same noise, and he might not dare to say it yet, but _god_ , he nearly kisses her anyway just because of that sound. Her nails bite into him. “That’s mean.” She’s delighted, her lips curling up, half-shocked, half-smiling. “That’s _mean_.”

“I never said I was nice,” Matt says, and he feels like he’s splitting open with all the maybes. He forgets how well he can lie to himself, yes. But he’s always going to remember how powerful hope can be.


	6. Revelations 12:9 - Silk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooo, it's a little early according to my new schedule (it's Sunday night right now, not Monday morning) but now that I have internet at home, the internet at my work has gone out, and I'd rather not get up earlier than usual to edit and post this. SO. There's that.
> 
> This chapter is also a little bit shorter than the others, but since Darcy's not actually in it, there's no dorkflirting and constant second-guessing to sort through on Matt's part. XD 
> 
> Trigger warnings for: some violence, sexism (Stiiiiiick), uh...blood, self-esteem issues, self-doubt, self-loathing (Matthewwwwww), and some gaslighting. 
> 
> ...yup. So! New schedule. I update every Monday (Japan time). I might be early sometimes, but I will do my damnedest not to be late.

It feels like he’s been transported back in time, Matt thinks, as Stick slips down the stairs behind him, taking in the sounds and smells and geography of the corner apartment. It feels like a thousand years and not at all, because the crackle of brittle, fierce bones in Stick’s hands is the same. The way he walks is the same, light, barely audible, still and smooth and controlled. All of it is the same, but all of it’s different, because this is a man he’d never expected to see again.

 _I expected too much of you_.

“You’ve had a woman in here,” Stick says. He tips his head, breathes. “More than one.”

“That," Matt says, "is none of your business.”

“The hell it isn’t. They’re smeared all over this place like goddamn bloodstains. One of ‘em—nurse? Can always pick out nurses. Beeswax and latex. The other one—” He takes another breath. “Jesus, Matty. I think I’m gonna gag. How many times have you had her in here? She’s all over. ”

He knows that. He can probably pick it out even more easily than Stick, the subtle nuances of it. What day it was. Where she’s been, what she’s touched. _All over_ , and it could mean the apartment or it could mean just him. _She’s all over._ She’s carved him open and burned the whorls and arches of her fingerprints onto his insides. “Drop it, Stick.”

“Christ.” Stick drops down onto the couch, hands on his knees, sitting straight. He’s loose and unconcerned and careful to keep his back away from Matt, and Matt’s not entirely sure if it’s because he’s trying to be nonchalant, or trying to keep his temper in check. Or both. “Are you in love with her?”

For a second, it’s years and years ago, and he can taste vanilla and salt and bitter earth on his lips. _Her skin’s too hot. Her heart’s beating fast._ _Is she sick?_ he’d asked, and Stick—God, Stick. _Worse,_ he’d said, disgusted, like he was scraping dog shit off his shoe. _Worse. She’s in love._ “You don’t want to go there,” says Matt. The devil creeps up his throat, clawing at the inside of his mouth. “You really—really don’t want to go there with me, Stick.”

“So intimidating,” Stick says, and leans back into the couch. The last person to sit in that spot had been Foggy, three days ago, and Matt can’t remember what they talked about. “You never heard a damn thing I tried to tell you, did you? Silk sheets.” He scoffs. “Silk sheets and women.”

“Stick.”

 “ _Stick_ ,” Stick echoes back at him, mimicking, mocking, but it’s not Matt’s voice, not really. Or, at least, it’s not the Matt in this moment, blood in his mouth and his side aching from the bite of the taser. It’s the Matt of all those years ago, shouting. _It’s my fault. I did it. I killed him._ “This isn’t what you’re supposed to be, Matty. You know that.”

“And what am I supposed to be?” He yanks off his gloves, leaves them on the coffee table. “A soldier? For your war?”

“You’re a warrior, or you were. This—” Stick waves a hand, taking in the furniture, flicking his fingers towards the bedroom with the silk sheets and the shuttered windows, the single photo frame on the kitchen counter “—this fluffy bullshit is beneath you.”

“You’re pissed,” Matt says. It’s almost a tangible thing in the air between them, hanging, grasping with heavy claws. “You’re pissed that I made something more out of myself than what you wanted me to be. That I made a life for myself.”

“No.” His heartbeat doesn’t shift from its steady rhythm. “No, I’m proud of you for that. But—but this bullshit, this isn’t life. This is poison. It’ll strangle you when you least expect it.”  

For a second, he shifts from foot to foot, uncertain. Then he remembers that he isn’t ten anymore, that he doesn’t need to listen to Stick anymore, that he’s already picked apart everything Stick ever told him and figured out exactly which parts were lies. Matt folds his hands in and out of fists, once, twice. “What do you want, Stick?”

Stick shifts his weight a little. “I want you to remember what you were supposed to be. What you _wanted_ to be. Quit with the lies.”

“A warrior.” He shakes his head. “That’s not me.”

“The hell it isn’t.” Stick opens his hands to the apartment again, tips his head in the way that means _you’re a fucking idiot and I want you to know it._ “This is what isn’t you. The—Christ. You even have _friends,_ don’t you?”

 _Fuck you_ , he nearly says. _Get out of my apartment, get out of my city, get out of my life._ Because he can feel it, creeping into his head, all the doubts he’s been having about the lies and the deceit and _you’re all beat up again, why are you all beat up again_ , because if he’d listened to Stick all those years ago he wouldn’t be feeling this, right now, he wouldn’t have to loathe himself this much, because if he’d listened to Stick, Foggy and Darcy and Karen would never have been there for him to lie to in the first place—

He stops abruptly, revolted with himself.

“Three.” It’s a dare. He puts his shoulders back and turns towards Stick’s grimacing look. _Come at me, Stick, if you think I’m wrong._ “I have three.”

 _Three, three people out of over seven billion, three people that I care about, three people in the whole world that are mine, and I swear to God if you come near them, if you touch them_ —

“Cut them loose,” Stick says. It’s an order. “Break their hearts. Get away from them. They tie you down, make you weak. Make you emotional. Because if they stick around, you’re going to watch them suffer and die and there’ll be nothing you’ll be able to do about it.”

“I’m not going to let that happen.”

“People die in war, Matty. Things like this—pillows, photographs—” his lip curls “— _relationships_. Your castle of soft things, your—your fortress of silk _._ All they do is slow us up. Have to nip it in the bud, before it gets too big to stop.”

“And that’s what you did with me.”

“I needed a soldier. You wanted a father.” He lifts his hands, as if he’s a scale, weighing need and want and heartbreak all at once. “What do you want from me?”

“The truth.”

“Truth is relative.”

Matt clenches his hands. “I was a kid.”

“And you still are, if this bullshit is all you’ve been doing with your life.” Stick stands, and kicks his bag underneath the couch. It’s a territorial claim, and the hairs at his nape rise. Matt almost bares his teeth. “You never answered my question.”

“You never had the right to ask it.”

“Don’t fuck around with me, kid.” He presses his lips tight together. For the first time, his heart rate has shifted. Matt can’t tell if it’s because of anger, or something considerably less controlled. “You in love with her?”

“What do you care?”

“It’s one thing if you’re fucking her,” says Stick, and Matt almost flinches with the venom that spurts out, at the _anger_ , barely leashed. “If you’re just fucking her, she’s a pet. Easy enough to get rid of. Toss it in a bag, throw it in the river.”

“Jesus Christ, Stick.”

“But if you’re in love with her—” Stick continues, his voice getting louder, sharper. “If you’re in love with her—shit. I try to teach you how to stay alive and this is what you do? You’re worse than your old man ever was.”

 _Rage is a wildfire_ , Stick says in the back of his head, _out of control, therefore, useless,_ but Matt doesn’t care. His blood’s on fire. “I told you to drop it.”

Stick doesn’t pay attention. “Fucking stupid shit. Love is a disease; it gets inside your head, rewires all your circuits, turns you soft and blubbery and _pathetic_. You’re not even sleeping with her, are you? I can tell by the way this goddamn place smells. What’s her name, this girl?”

“Back _off_ ,” Matt says, through gritted teeth. Or the devil says it, he’s not sure. He tries to keep a line between them, but sometimes he wonders if he’s always the devil, if the mask he puts on every day isn’t the glasses and the careful quiet of Matt Murdock. Either way, his jaw is aching. “Shut _up_.”

“Who is she?” Stick steps away from the couch. “Your neighbor? No, she’s not here often enough for that. Secretary, maybe. One of your legal partners.” Matt tries not to flinch, and he thinks he succeeds, but Stick’s always been too good at reading people, too good not to notice. “Which one is it, Nelson or Lewis? You ever tell her, this girl? Who you are, what you do?”

 _Darcy_ ¸ he’d said, and she’d stopped, blinking at him, quizzical. The words had been clinging to his tongue. _I need to tell you something._ But he’d chickened out, because the terror had punched him hard enough to knock the breath out of him. _If I tell you the truth,_ he’d thought, listening to her, _will you leave? If I tell you what I do, will you run?_

(— _you’re an asshole,_ she’d said into his neck, tears clinging to her eyelashes and smearing against his skin, _you’re an asshole,_ and her heart—God, her heart had been everywhere, going way too fast. She’d smelled like hospital and like Claire and like blood and smoke and death, and all he’d been able to think was _you’re going to have to decide which is worse: having her hate you for a while, but thank you for telling her the truth, or having her work it out on her own, and blame you for the lies?_ )

“You think she’d ever give a shit if she knew what you were?” Stick says, and that’s easy enough to answer. _She wouldn’t. But it doesn’t matter_. “You think you can pretend to be one of them, one of the _sheep_? You can’t, Matty, so tough shit. You’re not built for it and never were. Hell, from what I heard your father was a drunken loser, but at least he knew to quit pining after women who never—”

He moves. He can’t remember doing it, but he moves. Stick wrenches his arm up behind his back and he flips, snapping around, wrenching free, and it’s the first time he’s ever managed that. He doesn’t feel proud of it. He feels _vicious_. It carries him through into a spin kick that clips Stick hard in the jaw, knocks him sideways. He backs up before Stick can catch his breath, gets out of the way. Matt remembers how Stick is when someone else manages to land a hit. _Whatever you feel, double it for them, because your enemies should control jack shit by the time you’re finished._  

“What the hell do you want from me?” he says, and Stick swipes blood off of his newly split lip. “Or are you trying to kill me with the suspense?”

“Took you twenty years to get out of that one,” Stick says, and that stings, because it hasn’t been twenty, not quite. Closer to sixteen. But he doesn’t correct him, because that would make him sound like he still gives a shit.

“What do you _want_?”

“A soldier,” says Stick. He cocks his head. Matt tips his right back at him. “I can do it on my own. Figured it’d be more polite to let you know.”

“Fine.” Matt rocks back, away from him. “But I want you to say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say you need my help.”

“Christ.” Stick touches his lip again. “When the hell did you turn into such a petty little shit?”

“I’m waiting.”

“I want you to help yourself.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. It’s the closest he’ll come, Matt knows. It still feels inadequate. “Are you coming or not?”

“You don’t kill anyone,” says Matt. “And I’ll come.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Matt just waits. Stick lifts his right hand. His heartbeat is steady and strong as he says, “I swear, I will not kill anybody.”

It’s not quite enough. But it has to be. “Fine.”

“You and your fucking half-measures.” Stick tugs the bag out from under the couch again. “Was it your Juliet that turned you this soft, or did you get blinder, all those years I was gone?”

“That,” says Matt, “is a conversation that we are never going to have.”

Stick mutters something under his breath, something that he has to know Matt will hear, but Matt ignores it. _I expected too much of you_ , he thinks, and for the first time it’s not Stick saying it to him, ringing in his memory. It’s the other way around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my Tumblr is shu-of-the-wind.
> 
> I also published a Matt playlist recently! 8tracks.com/shuofthewind/up-your-throat-out-your-mouth
> 
> On that note, if anyone would like to do me a huge favor and make a mix cover for a Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis mix, I will write you things. Probably. I still owe people things from TPoW. But still.


	7. Seven Sins, Seven Virtues - Lilith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: drug references, drug use references, references to date rape, references to rape, references to violence, implied/outright stated discussion of murder, self-esteem issues, self-loathing, blah blah blah, Hello My Name Is Matt Murdock And I Am An Angst Addict, et cetera.
> 
> Changing the naming scheme of the chapters. Because I can. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed.

There had been one night, towards the end of his relationship with Elektra, where she’d asked him to come with her.

There had been a lot of nights like that, actually. All through their relationship. Elektra had come into his life with the same amount of fanfare as a black cat at midnight, slinking, careful. Which isn’t to say she’s _evil_. Black cats aren’t evil, they’re simply bred, the way Elektra is, the way he is. He’s certain that she never will be evil, not truly, no matter how far she falls, no matter how deep the stains go.

He’d skimmed over it, their history. Darcy—she’d known precisely what he was doing, that day in the basketball court, talking around Elektra, mentioning her and glancing away—but she hadn’t pushed, and he’s never going to be sure how to thank her for it. He doesn’t like talking about Elektra. (— _blood on blades and a wild scream and hair flying in every direction_ —) Matt doesn’t know how to describe her without describing the worst and best parts of himself, because at their core, they’re the same, him and Elektra Natchios. And yet they’re not, because there are things he’s done, that he’s thought about doing, that Elektra would never stoop to—and there are things that she’s done that make him wonder if she’s human. ( _Why did He put the Devil in me, Father, why_ —) That night stands out stark in his memory just for that, blood smeared across her mouth, a body lying sprawled on the alleyway ground. No heartbeat, no breath. Warm, but gone. Dead, and a knife clutched in one long-fingered hand.

( _He was one of them, Matthew, he was one of the men who—_ )

She’d asked him to come along, and he had, and a man had wound up dead. His fault, and hers. More his than hers, if he’s honest. (He should have done more, should have been able to stop it, to keep her from falling, but she’d slipped right through his fingers without a sound, in utter silence, even for him, and she’s gone and he can’t get her back—) Elektra’s gone, but every day something darts across his senses that makes him think of her. A shadow, a smell, a flicker of cloth on the wind. It’s been years and he still can’t decide if he hates her or not. (He doesn’t, of course he doesn’t, but if he doesn’t hate her then what on earth _can_ he feel for her, what _should_ he feel for a woman who’d traipsed along the edge of violence and come away cut and bloody, nearly pulled him apart, nearly made him forget everything he’d ever tried to become—)

( _You killed him, Elektra, you killed him, we don’t—_ )

The fact of the matter is that Elektra is as much a part of him as his father is, as Stick is, as Foggy is, as Darcy is. Formative, and transformative. He can no more erase her marks on him than he could wipe away all the bruises left behind by Foggy’s broken trust, or scrub Darcy’s tears and fury out of his bones.  He doesn’t want to wash her away. He’s built back up his control since then, since the flashpoint, but sometimes ( _Fisk_ , he thinks, _Fisk and Wesley and Nobu, the blood, his lips on her skin,_ don’t be a fucking hero right now _and_ I’m not going to let you die just because of me, _and how can she not understand that if he is going to die he’d rather it be for her than for nothing_ —) it feels like he’s standing on the edge of a rooftop, and all it’ll take is one good gust of wind to have him fall in silence, too.

( _He didn’t deserve to live—_ )

So having Darcy here—wigged, made-up, but blood still fresh underneath the bandages, stitches and broken bones and gloves hiding away her hurts—God. ( _I said you didn’t have to do this by yourself anymore. I meant it, Matt. You don’t have to handle all this alone._ ) ( _But the last time I wasn’t alone,_ he’d nearly said, he’d nearly screamed, _the last time, she fell, and I couldn’t save her. Her father died and I couldn’t stop it. She was ruined, because of me, and I can’t live through that happening to you too._ ) It’s a nightmare and it’s a dream come true, both at once. He hasn’t _enjoyed_ hunting like this since before the disaster of that one April night, and he’s so close to losing himself in having this, in having her, that he’s losing his balance. He’s waiting for something long-nailed and howling to lash out of the dark.

For some reason it hits him hardest as she’s rummaging through the girl’s wallet, picking over her phone. (The girl’s homeless, her hair unwashed, her clothes old, the street clinging to her hands and feet and sticking against her ribs, skin caving between her bones. He’s not sure Darcy’s realized it.) It’s déjà vu or a second chance or a curse, maybe he’s cursed, that the women he’s loved in his life get drawn into his darkness, into the shadows and monsters that crawl underneath his skin, and destroyed, ripped to pieces, all while he watches, too slow or too stupid or too naïve to stop it. He’d been joking when he’d said _you scare me_ , but it’s also the truth, cold and hard and knotting up his tongue. _You scare me._ Or: _what could happen to you scares me to death._

(But no, that’s not right, there’s a determined little voice that says that _can’t_ be right, because this darkness, this is something she’s _always_ had. That Elektra had _always_ had. _He was one of the men who killed my father_ , Elektra says, and Darcy, Darcy finally open, finally raw, bleeding and scarred and screaming: _every time I saw him, I’d imagine how I’d kill him._ She’d looked at him, on that staircase, head tipped, _you okay_ , and he’d _seen_ it then, the violence in her, the rage. She’d just done so much better at hiding it than he ever had. This is _her._ This is a part of her the way it’s a part of him and the way it was a part of Elektra, was or is, he doesn’t know, and _this_ —)

The rhythm of Lynch’s heart changes. He shakes the thought out of his head without moving, curling his fingers. “Lynch is waking up,” he says, and Darcy looks up at him (the mask is strange on her face, but he can hear her lashes flickering, knows she’s watching) before her mouth twists.

“Strong little fucker.” There’s a question in her voice that she doesn’t even know she’s asking. She rolls back to her feet, high heels and foreign shampoo and dusty leather. “So,” she says, slowly. “This is your night job, huh?”

Addiction. Nightmare. Night job. What’s the difference, really? “I guess.”

Darcy stands there, still and considering. She blinks, eyelashes scuffing against the inside of her mask. Then she reaches out with her good hand, touches her fingertips to his shoulder and draws them down, along the length of his arm, past his elbow to where the bandages are, where Nobu had sliced him. His shirt’s thin, and the touch raises goosebumps, flushes blood into his arms and legs and the skin at the nape of his neck. He thinks of her mouth and how she catches her breath when he kisses her, as if it’s a surprise. Every time so far. Possibly every time from now until it ends. ( _Please, God, don’t let it end._ ) The way her heartbeat had felt against his chest as he’d listened to her sleep, limbs matted together with his, her hair tickling at his shirt. He has to swallow to keep the words back, because they’re living things, ripping out of his insides and ready to fly at her, inhale her, leaving behind nothing but blood beneath his ribs. She wets her lips down, shifting the lipstick just slightly. “We’re big goddamn heroes,” she says. “And I want to tase Jenson, too, so let’s get out there before he wakes up.”

There’s something hot and uncomfortable pressed against the backs of his eyes. Matt laces his fingers between hers, a momentary thing, because they don’t have more than an instant, but she holds on for as long as he lets her. Her skin’s practically blazing with heat. _I love you,_ she’d said, simply, the truth, nothing but the truth. _I love you, Matt._ And he can _feel_ it.

(He thinks of one of his last confessions, of Father Lantom through the lattice. “Do you think telling the truth will get her killed, or do you think that if she learns the truth she’ll wind up destroying herself?” And he’s still not sure, won’t ever be sure, _can’t_ ever be sure, because there’s his own cowardice and his own fear and his own self-loathing, and then there’s his terror that if he fucks up, if he drags her in too deep, he’ll destroy her like he destroyed Elektra and he can’t live with that, he _can’t_ live with that—)

“Big goddamn heroes,” he says. He searches for the lie, and can’t find it. He nearly bends into her, nearly kisses her, because he wants her lipstick smeared on his mouth. The color of blood, he thinks. He wants to mark her. He wants to have the shadow of his hands on her skin blaring like neon signs. He wants her written all over him where everyone can see.

Darcy smiles, small and secret, and slips away from him, out into the kitchen.

Lynch and Jenson make his head spin. Heroin, he thinks, heroin and alcohol and a dozen kinds of perfume, mutant growth hormone in all its sickly glory, metal and glass and smoke from four different crack pipes, all of it layered, back and forth, going back days. The MGH keeps them from going under, he thinks. Lynch has more of it in him than Jenson. That, or he’s just more stubborn. His ribs rattle when he sees Darcy, and he loses his grip on the countertop, thunking back to the floor. It nearly cracks his coccyx. “Jesus. Who the _fuck_ are you?”

She breathes. Darcy closes her eyes, and opens them again, slowly. She presses her lips together. “I told you my name before,” she says, and there’s a lilt to her voice that he’s only ever heard when she’s drunk or half-asleep. This time, though: this time it’s not a lilt, it’s a soft, buzzing drawl (poor South, not rich South, because there’s a difference, he knows it) that makes him think of low-rolling storms. Foggy’s always called her _Hurricane Lewis_ , but this time, she really might be. “Weren’t you paying attention?”

Lynch is _steaming_. His tendons creak with the effort he’s putting into trying to get up, but his legs keep not cooperating. He slurs when he talks, his dry tongue sticking to his teeth. “You fucking _bitch_. You fucking _tased me_ , you goddamn fat-ass crack whore, I’m going to fucking kill you—”

 _You can try_ , the devil thinks, almost lazily. And yeah. Lynch could certainly try. He steps forward, touches his fingers to Darcy’s shoulder ( _Lilith_ , he thinks, wound up in the rhythm of her breathing, _Lilith, smoky and shadowy and indistinct_ ) and Lynch’s heart chokes on itself.

“I’d be nice to the woman if I were you.” He’s not sure if it’s a threat or not. He probably should be. “She has a temper.”

Darcy-Lilith-Darcy looks back at him, and lets a long, slow smile curl across her mouth. Every part of him is buzzing. Her heart rate has dropped to something steady, soothing. She looks away from him. There’s something about the way she’s standing that echoes.

“Queen of monsters,” she says, almost a croon, and the devil in him thinks, _mine._ Utterly without qualm. _This one is mine_. He’s careened so close to the edge that he can taste the way it would feel to hit the pavement, stories and miles and worlds below them. Darcy’s talking ( _Darcy or Lilith or Darcy, I don’t know, is there a difference_ ) but he’s too fixed on that echoing point, the fluidity in her bones and the lift and sway of her lungs. If he hadn’t known how much of a sick bastard he was before, he knows now, as he listens to it, because somewhere between _We have a lot of things to talk about, I think,_ and _I know, I just wanted to see if he’d try it_ his blood turns to tar and his mouth turns to chalk and he wants to put his teeth on her skin, bite until he leaves marks behind. _This one is mine. This one is one of mine._

( _He didn’t deserve to live, Matthew, you can’t tell me that he did—_ )

( _I can’t lose her to this, please, God, don’t let me lose her—_ )

“She’s going to fucking kill me,” Lynch says, through the fog. “She’s going to fucking _kill_ me.” And Lilith replies, “I could. I want to. But you can help me. So I won’t.”

 _So I won’t._   

It’s a meteor, a crater, a cataclysm. Different, but the same. _No._ The same, but different. They’re _different,_ and always have been. (—she crouches down, leans into Lynch’s space, and Lynch shies away like she has a knife to his throat—) They’re different, Elektra and Darcy, and always have been. The similarities are there—the similarities scare the living hell out of him, because he barely built himself back up after Elektra left—but ( _—directly to the 15th_ —) they’re different. Blades honed for different reasons and used in different ways. An assassin’s dagger and a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting the same way, but for completely different reasons.

At the end of it all, Elektra had cut him to ribbons. (— _and you drugged her and sent her off to be raped like a good little boy_ —) Or maybe they both had, her and him both, regardless of who held the knife. Darcy, though—she stitches him back together. He has the threads in his skin to prove it, tugging as he moves, reminding him. Every single wound on him has been touched by her, mended by her, held together by her. He can’t forget that. He _won’t_ forget that, because _that_ —that’s the difference. Violence wrangled into a tool, instead of set free to wreak havoc. Elektra, he realizes, as Darcy—Lilith, Darcy, both of them, all of her—shakes her head, says, “He doesn’t give a damn about you”—Elektra worked it out before he did. There had been a quiet thoughtfulness to her when he’d mentioned Darcy’s name, a curiousness that she hadn’t shown towards Foggy. Not jealousy, interest. And she’d gone after it, because Elektra had never not gone after whatever made her curious. She’d slunk into Darcy’s shadow and started prodding around, started asking questions and telling secrets (because everything had been a secret, with Elektra, every scrap of information held so close that it had been like prying titanium with a crowbar) and _talking_. In the weeks before her father’s death, Elektra had _talked_ to Darcy, and that more than anything still blows his mind. Then again, Elektra’s instincts always have been and always will be better than his.

(“I—I was an accomplice in the rape and assault of Katherine Elinor Bishop.”)

Karen’s known since the first moment, somehow. Kate’s known. Foggy’s known. Darcy’s glue; she’s a needle and thread, she’s cement, she’s epoxy, she’s everything that mends. She sees broken people and she never thinks of them as anything less than whole, never once makes them feel wrong for being shattered, and maybe if he’d worked it out sooner Elektra wouldn’t have fallen apart the way she had. _You make me better. Since the beginning, you’ve made me better. You’ve always made all of us better._

The same. But different.

Electricity crackles. _Hurricane Lewis_. She’s panting, her heart racing again, coming down from the high, and when she turns away to shove Jenson’s leg out of her way, his thoughts scatter. He can’t swallow. He can’t _think,_ because there’s her voice curling inside him, and the snap and pop of electricity, and Lynch’s terror and the _satisfaction_ in her at the sight of it. _I could. I want to. But you can help me. So I won’t._  

_I won’t._

( _—deserved to die_ —)

Darcy stares at him, unblinking, her ribs rising and falling fast. He needs to touch her, right now, needs—he doesn’t know. He catches her hand, pushes her sleeve up. He can’t feel her skin through the glove, but when he lifts her wrist to his lips, her pulse jumps. She watches in silence, mouth just barely open, her heart racing. There are a thousand different thoughts in his head and they’re all crashing together. _How do you exist. How are you real. What did I do to be lucky enough to find you. Please, God, please don’t take you away. You’re real, and you’re—I_ know _you, I recognize you, there’s dark in you but it’s beautiful in a way I never thought it could be before, and God, God, God, I love you._

“Where did you even _come_ from?” he says, because it’s the only thing that whittles everything else down, the only thing that he can’t understand. Because where _did_ she come from, shadows and fire, blazing inside his head, so deeply rooted that to tear her out would be to tear him apart. She catches her breath a little.

“I told you,” she says. “Georgia.”

He means _who made you._ He means _who let me find you._ He means _somehow all my broken pieces line up alongside yours and I’m not sure how it happened, or if it’s always been this way, but I can’t lose you._ He means all of it and none of it, everything and nothing. He steps closer, until she’s right up against him. _Mark me. Let me mark you._ He puts his mouth back to her wrist, tastes her skin, and she sucks in a deep breath of air, heat flaring in her cheeks, her heart skipping, leaping. Matt swipes her sleeve higher up her arm, shifts his mouth, and he just—she’s ripping his control apart, but this time it’s not agony. It’s relief and want and desperation and joy, giddiness, a trembling that he can’t stop, doesn’t want to end. There’s some kind of recognition that’s deeper than blood or bone or gut, something beyond all of that, if something deeper than that exists. _Soul_ , something whispers in the back of his head, but that’s fanciful. He pushes it aside. He just—he _knows_ that anger. The way her heartbeat had shifted during her talk with Jenson, he knows that beat. The way her voice had changed, he knows that sound. All of that he knows. _You’re like me. It’s like—_

 _The same, but different._ But the monster in her, the monster in him:  _different, but the same._

Lilith. Queen of monsters, mother of demons. Hel and Persephone and Darcy, Darcy Lewis from Atlanta, Georgia, Darcy who’s never once shied away. _You’ve always made me better, because something in me always knew. You and me, we’re the same. We’re the same. God, we’re the same. Please don’t let me lose you._

 _This one is mine_ , he thinks, and lets her go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my Tumblr is shu-of-the-wind.


	8. Dark and Dawn - Blazing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EIGHT MINUTES BEFORE THE MIDNIGHT DEADLINE HAHAHAHA
> 
> Trigger warnings for: blood, busted stitches, repair of said stitches, some discussion of wounds and broken bones. If you read TPoW, you're in the clear. 
> 
> ...I think this is the first time I've had a Matt POV in this that was so completely and totally _happy_. It's really, really good for him. 
> 
> He's also a lovestruck loon and it's so fucking great I can't even. Because you tell me Matt Murdock is not a lovestruck loon when it comes to the people he falls for, and I will show you the door. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed.

He doesn’t wake up until he hears the key in the lock. Matt keeps his eyes closed, even as his breathing shallows out, snapping into overdrive. There’s always a breath, a moment, a gut-wrenching drop into consciousness where he can’t exactly tell which parts of him actually belong to him, and which parts are things that have been tugging at his ears while he’s asleep. Mrs. Hseng is listening to the Cantonese station on top volume again two floors down. He clenches one hand into a fist, or he starts to—the tug of torn muscle in his forearm makes him stop again almost immediately. There are a cacophony of scents hanging in the air—the nurse Darcy produced out of nowhere, antiseptic and sweat-stained clothes and smoke and something that reminds him of fur; Karen, vanilla and salt from the tears on her cheeks, the can of mace she keeps on her purse leaving small traces on her hands; Jen, cat fur and pencil lead and ink and wax and paper, crying; and Foggy, who’d smelled like Matt’s blood and like Darcy’s, like the remains of Matt’s uniform and the fury that was still practically hanging suspended in the air like some gigantic deadly spider. There’s blood on the bandages on his side, the scrape of broken stitches in his skin. Everything registers in less than a second, hounding him. Then he takes another breath, and nearly bites his tongue. There are four ribs with hairline fractures, each of them with their own distinct sound. Every time he takes a mouthful of air it’s like a tiny symphony.

The key snaps into place. Matt shifts, or tries to, in the moment before Darcy opens the door, but he’s still more than half asleep, so he doesn’t get very far with it. She drops the keys in the bowl by the door (she must have borrowed his, and there’s something about that idea that hits him hard right in the stomach, knocking him breathless) and hangs her coat, carefully, easing it off over her torn-up hand before leaving it on the hook. He’s still struggling to move when she slips into the living room, and comes to a stop, looking at him.

“You tore your stitches,” she says, in a voice he’s never really heard out of her before. Not—not exasperated, exactly. Her skin is almost glowing, it’s so warm, and there’s a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth that she’s trying desperately not to show. “You _tore your stitches_. In the four hours I was gone. Without ever leaving the couch.”

He tugs the hem of his shirt down again. There’s a giddy sort of trembling in the back of his throat, a shivering underneath his fractured ribs. She’s flaming with heat, her heart’s picked up, she’s smiling, and _I love you, Matt_ is still ringing in his head. _For a long time._ “I was asleep,” he says. He sounds husky, even for him. “I can’t be held accountable for this.”

“If you did that while you were asleep, then, news flash, you sleep like a crazy person.” She moves very gingerly, slipping her shoes off (Karen had brought her a new pair from the apartment, since she’d lost them somewhere in between Elena’s tenement and the warehouse where Nobu and Wesley and Fisk had been keeping her; she tucks them under the hallway table) and padding back to the bathroom where they’d left the first aid kit. She’s been in his apartment a million times, but this seems—fresher, somehow. Or…he’s not sure. It’s different. (He wants to put his hands on her skin, trace out the lines of her veins and her arteries, listen to her heartbeat, and he _can_ , he can’t get over it, he should be horrified that he’s letting her in this close, but there’s no room in him for horror, not right now, just joy for Darcy and grief for Foggy and all of it’s tangling up into a twisted knot—) She comes back out with her broken wrist braced close against her stomach. She’s probably not even aware that she’s doing it. “I’ve never even heard of someone tearing their stitches in their sleep.”

“I do somnambulistic gymnastics sometimes,” Matt says, as she puts the first aid kit on the makeshift milk carton that is now his coffee table. “Keeps me limber.”

She huffs through her nose, and loses the battle with her smile. The heater’s on, and there’s an air current passing close enough to her face that he can make out the exact angle of it, crooked and gleaming and something a little more than that. “You’re such a weirdo.”

“Maybe.” Matt touches his fingers to the blanket slung over his knees. He can reach out and touch her, he knows. It’s just—it’s something foreign, something new, and he doesn’t want to drive her off. “It’s possible.”

Darcy curls her good hand into the hem of her sweatshirt, rocking back and forth on her feet. Then she cups her hand around the back of his neck, pushing her thumb into a knotted muscle that he hadn’t even realized was there. She doesn’t even hesitate, drawn to it like a magnet, and some kind of little sound catches in the back of his throat when she presses down hard. Darcy draws her finger along the line of the knot, and then pulls her hand back.

“I would say it’s more than possible,” she says. Her voice scrapes like the edge of a razor against his jaw. There’s candle smoke clinging to her hair, coffee and cream and church smells. She’s been to the cathedral. “You—you shouldn’t do gymnastics while you’re sleeping. It’s bad for you.”

“Hey,” Matt says, and for an instant all he can think is this morning (and it’s only this morning, only a few hours, four hours of sleep and an hour of consciousness, and how can he go from loathing himself so completely to being so absolutely, unquestionably, irreversibly _happy_ in the span of a few hours) and reaching out to her and having her take his hand without hesitation, despite of what she’d seen, despite of the split skin and the bruises. _I’m not hurting you?_ And she’d been so breathless and quiet that he’d slipped into awe. _Butterfly hands._

(His hands are nothing like butterflies. His hands are broken boxer’s hands, like his father’s, like Stick’s, not as bad, not yet, but with strains and healed fractures and knobs of bone scraping against each other in ways that they shouldn’t. If anyone has butterfly hands, he thinks, it’s her. But he doesn’t say that.)  

“Hey,” he says, again, quieter, and Darcy looks up from the first aid kit. When he wraps his hand around her wrist, she comes without question, bending down. He touches his fingertips to the underside of her jaw, the soft skin there, a fleck of a scar just beneath her chin. He can hear it when her heart picks up, and how the hell had he been so fucking stupid? How had he never heard this? She touches him and it’s a caress. She _breathes_ , and her skin flares hot and wild and consumes him. Her mouth curls a little, and she leans closer, just enough that the tip of her nose brushes over his.

“What?”

He wets his lips, and air catches in her mouth. “I missed you.”

“You fell asleep. You were probably asleep before I even shut the door.”

He can’t really explain it. He’s awake, and she’d been gone, and he can feel her absence like a hollow just inside his ribs even if he’d never been aware of it. And yes, he knows how absolutely lovesick and ridiculous that is. (Stick’s in his head, just for a moment, _makes you soft, makes you weak_ , but he doesn’t feel like it’s doing either of those things. He’s not soft, not with her. He’s blazing. He feels like he should be burning the world just by breathing it in.) Matt traces the line of her jaw up to her cheekbone and then back into her hair, loose and curling and heavy with church smoke. “I still missed you.”

She presses her palm into his shoulder, curls her fingers into him. When she kisses him, it’s light, barely a touch, but the taste it leaves behind makes his head spin. Coffee and toothpaste and the slightest hint of blood left behind, and it could be from either of them, really, but it doesn’t sting at him like it should. The guilt can’t touch him, not right now.

“Well,” she says, after a moment. “I happened to be awake. And I missed you.”

Matt winds his fingers tighter into her hair and lifts his other hand, pressing his palm to her cheek, pulling her a little closer, and Darcy doesn’t follow—she sinks into it instead, twisting sideways until she’s settled halfway over his legs and her good hand is knotted up in the fabric of his T-shirt, over his heart, proprietary, like she knows she owns it. He can’t get over the taste and sound and smell of her, the feel of her under his hands. She’s heavy and warm and her heart’s fluttering inside her chest, she keeps breathing him in like she’s been wanting this forever, and he’s not entirely sure he’s ever going to be able to stop touching her. Because now he _can_ , and it’s precious.

Finally, she tips her head just enough to rest her lips to the skin of his cheek, rather than his mouth. “That’s a hello,” she says, crackling. “Is it always going to be like that?”

 _Always_ rings through every bone in his body. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I like these maybes.” She puts her mouth to the bruise on his cheekbone, and then pushes at him. “I really need to fix your stitches before we make them worse.”

“Does that involve you moving?”

“Quite probably it involves me moving,” Darcy says. She pushes at him again. “I don’t want you to bleed or get some kind of weird spider nest in your stomach, okay? I now have considerably more than a vested interest in your stomach. And the rest of you. Spiders are not okay.”

He’s not entirely sure if his skin is prickling from the imagery or the meaning behind the words. Matt’s not going to look into it overly much. He tips her chin up and kisses her again, once, twice, four times, and she lets out a little breath and just barely leans into him. She’s frightened of hurting him, he thinks. He can take a lot more punishment than this while he’s healing, but he doesn’t want to pick a fight with her, either. She makes a little muffled sound when he rests his hand to the back of her neck, two fingers slipping beneath the collar of her shirt, and leans back. “No. You are _not_ distracting me.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” Matt pushes his nose to her cheek. “I thought you were supposed to have better focus than this.”

“You’re a _menace_.”

“You’re not wrong.”

She sputters, but she’s grinning, and it’s arresting. “You _goober_. You’re such a _loser_ , oh my god. You have the super cool snarky lawyer thing going on to cover up the badass vigilante thing, but—but you’re a ball of melted cheese.”

“I feel like melted cheese would be a puddle, and not a ball.”

“ _Goober_ ,” she says again, shoulders shaking. “A big nerdy goober-cat.”

“Goober-cat?”

“It’s a technical term. For you. You’re a goober-cat. Literally the only thing I’m gonna call you anymore. Matt Murdock, goober-cat.”

“There was also the term badass being thrown around.”

“You’re fishing. That was a fishing moment. I should buy you a line and tackle.” She drops her good hand to the hem of his shirt, and then hesitates. Her fingers are brushing over the skin of his stomach, and he’s prickling all over again. “Can I?”

“Yeah.” This time his voice is the one that’s cracking. “Sure.”

He’s busted three stitches. Darcy has him thread the needle, grumbling under her breath when he does it on the first try, and sets to. She rests her bad had on his chest as she removes the broken stitches, adds in the fresh ones. She’s quiet, mostly, concentrating, her tongue caught between her teeth. Matt doesn’t move. He barely breathes.

“I was thinking,” she says, as she makes the second stitch. “I was going to go back to Jen’s.”

Something heavy and cold lands hard on his sternum. Matt’s very careful to keep his voice steady as he says, “That’s probably a good idea.”

For the first time, Darcy shifts her grip on the needle tweezers. She swallows. “Like I said. I was _going_ to go back to Jen’s. Then you did somnambulistic gymnastics.”

“It’s useful.”

“You’re a fucking liar and should shut your mouth,” she says, affectionately, and clips the thread so she can pull the last stitch tight. Her hand is trembling. “I was—I was thinking, maybe, that I should—well. I mean. If I leave you here alone, you’re probably gonna do something stupid. It’s your trademark, you can’t help it. Dumpsters and—and knife wounds and bad decisions.”

“It’s a lifestyle.”

She pats her hand vaguely at an unbruised spot on his stomach, and goes to repair the last stich. “I just—maybe, if it’s okay with you, you know. I could…just for a couple of days.”

He takes a breath, and it feels like the first one in years. “If you want,” he says, not too fast, but he’s eager and desperate and she’s not rolling her eyes, so it’s probably all right. “I mean, if Elena’s staying with Jen, it’d probably be safer for the pair of you.”

“Not to mention you and your bad habits.” She lines up the needle. “I just, you know. Need to make sure you don’t kill yourself following me around, because _I know you will_ , you stalker, you seriously have to start knocking over trash cans or something—”

“—that’s a little beside the point if I’m trying to—don’t jab the needle so hard, Jesus—”

“I wouldn’t have to jab it if you didn’t keep wiggling.” She wraps it off, folds up a new thing of gauze one handed. Her fingers are still shaking. When she presses it to the gash, Matt covers his hand with hers. There’s not even a question about it, anymore. Darcy lifts her head, searches his face. She’s shaking.

“I’m okay.” He lifts his other hand, brushes the backs of his fingers over her cheek. “I’m okay.”

“You’re a shit liar,” she says. “When it really counts, you—you really can’t lie for shit.”

Matt strokes her cheek again. Darcy clears her throat, looks down at his ribs. She’s taped a new gauze pad over the marks left behind by Nobu’s blade when he finally says, “I think the only person who thinks that is you.”

Darcy’s head snaps up. She looks at him for a long time. When she laughs, it’s trembly. “Is that—is that some kind of warning about how I should be keeping an eye out for more lies?”

“No.” He swipes his thumb over her cheekbone. He loves the shape of her face, the angles of it. He wants to memorize the placement of her ones. “No, it’s—it’s me saying that I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who can tell when I’m lying, anymore.”

There’s a flicker of salt on her eyelashes. “Because I did such a good job of that.”

“Darcy.” Finally, he swings his legs off the couch. Darcy makes a strangled little noise, lifting her hand to press him back into the pillows, but he’s already moved. The stitches hold, which is all he cares about. The pain can be pushed back until later. “You do. I’m—I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who can.”

She digests that, slowly. Her heart’s beating fast. Darcy licks her lips, and takes his hand, drawing it away from her face. She doesn’t let go. Instead, she braces her thumb against his fingers, studying the bruises, the splits, the scabs. She flicks a look up at him, wondering, searching for something. Then she lifts his hand, and presses her mouth to his knuckles. Everything in him quakes. Of course he feels it—there’s an ache in his hand, now—but it’s—it means more anything than she could ever have said. She pushes her thumb into the middle of his palm, and sets her lips to his fingers, one more time, before lifting her head to watch him.

“I’m going to stay here,” she says. “Just until I make sure you’re not going to die. And—and you’re not going to sleep on the couch.”

“Neither are you.”

“We’re not fighting over the bed, Matt, that’s—that’s stupid.” She lifts his hand to her cheek, turns her face into it. Her lips brush over his skin again. “We’ll both use it. I’m pretty sure you’re trustworthy.”

It takes a moment for that to process through the buzzing in his head. Darcy’s slept in his bed more times than he can remember, but he—they haven’t done anything like this. Not since undergrad. Not since the night he went after Mickey’s father. It feels like something inside him has turned into a supernova. “I’m the one who should be worried,” he says, after a moment. “I’m defenseless, at the moment.”

“But you’re also warm,” she says, “and my feet are fucking freezing. So you’re safe, for now.”

He’s an idiot, for sure. He’s a liar. But he’s sure as hell not stupid. When she weaves her hand into his, Matt lets her help him up off the couch.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my Tumblr is shu-of-the-wind.
> 
> I have a number of Darecy AUs in the works, since I seem to have made it my life goal to put as much into this niche pairing as I possibly can. So! I have a selection for you. Which would you like to see first?
> 
> a) an X-Files AU (yes, I am that person)  
> b) Darcy/Matt/Elektra  
> c) the sequel to _i try to picture me without you (but i can't)_  
>  d) a fake dating AU
> 
> The next chapter of the Jess fic should be up sometime this week, so keep an eye out for that too!


	9. Playing Ostrich - Talons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a day late, you guys! I'm sick and it's the end of the school year, so yesterday was a little crazy. (I'm working on _pray_ too, so keep an eye out for that!) 
> 
> Trigger warnings for: general Matt Murdock-ness, some discussion of/allusion to attempted murder (it's Playing Ostrich, so...), some references to blood, a lot of shouting. One mention of rape (Kate's). Little bit of body squick when it comes to knives and throats, but like...you watched _Daredevil_. Not any worse than Healy.
> 
> Y'all are really lucky I decided to go with this instead of Revelations 12:9 because I was _really_ tempted to throw heavy angst in your face after all the fluff that was last chapter. But I didn't. Be thankful. Unless you're really masochistic and wanted all that pain, in which case, I salute you, sibling. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed.

If there’s one single thing he has to thank Kate Bishop for (there are a multitude of things he has to thank Kate Bishop for, especially after it all, after Fisk is in custody and Vanessa’s escaped and all the rest) it’s that she waits until they’ve put Ben Urich into a safe place and locked the door behind him before she turns to him and says, “So, how’s it work, being a blind vigilante?”

Matt stills. There aren’t any cameras here. Or audio recorders. It’s an alley and it’s dark and nobody’s paying attention to the devil and the girl with a bleeding arm and a bow held close against her hip. “I’m sorry?”

“Don’t be a jackass, Murdock, you’re really not that slick.” She cocks her head, waiting. He remembers going to the zoo on a school field trip when he was thirteen, and the way the Raptor House had echoed, clicking beaks, fast heartbeats. That’s what Kate Bishop sounds like. Like an owl or an eagle. The fletching on her arrows are her wings. “So how’s it work? Do you like—echolocate, or something? Are you a mutant? Like—half-bat?”

“Bats aren’t blind,” Matt says, because he can’t help it. He’s heard _blind as a bat_ for years and he really, really, _really_ can’t help it. “For the record.”

“Yeah, counselor, _for the record_.” She’s very pleased with herself. Her mouth keeps twitching. “ _I can still lift if someone spots me,_ my flat ass. That’s why you came after me so fast. Darcy told you I’d gone off the grid.” She lets her voice drop, go gravelly. She’s husky normally, but now she sounds unsettlingly wild. “ _We have a mutual friend._ Super classy, dude, seriously.”

(— _if she gets hurt it’ll be my fault, Matt, she’ll get hurt because—_ )

“I told you, I was doing my job.”

“Of course you were.”

He was. He would have gone after Kate Bishop with or without Darcy Lewis, but he’s not going to lie and say that her panic hadn’t made him work even faster than he would have without. Not to himself, anyway. “Can we not talk about that here?”

“Dude, you seriously just sat on top of my car and threw fucking soda cans at corrupt cops. I think I get like a five minute explanation of what is going on in basically the only alleyway in New York where I can promise you that _no one_ is listening.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure _you_ do.” She swings her bow up over her back, fingers stroking the grain of the wood as it goes. “Seriously, is it echolocation, or are you just like—Force sensitive? Is Ben Kenobi telling you people’s secrets?”

He shakes his head. “You could have killed someone driving the way you did.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t, because I know what I’m doing. I thought about going into drag racing for a while, but that means more fights with my dad that I don’t need.” She pops one hip out. “There were people filming all that, y’know. You’re probably going to end up on Youtube.”

“Don’t remind me.” He heaves himself up onto the fire escape, and doesn’t knock the ladder down for her. Bishop scowls at him, and then clambers up onto the dumpster, jumps to the railing, and follows up the stairs. “You need to go home and stay there. They’re coming after all of us.”

Kate’s heart skips a beat. She squeezes her hands into fists, ignoring the pulse of blood from the graze. “Everyone else is okay?”

 _Darcy’s in my apartment and she’s, uh. She’s not doing too good._ There are a million things that could mean. There are _infinite_ things that could mean. Burned flesh and blood and terror-sweat are still stuck in his throat, and he doesn’t think they’re ever going to go away. They’d _split up_ when they’d already decided they wouldn’t, he should have walked back with her, should have realized that the first thing Fisk would do when his mother was found would be go after the person who did it, and Fisk doesn’t think about Karen at all, but Fisk—Fisk knows Darcy, Wesley knew Darcy, and he should have realized—

“Hey,” Kate snaps, and she seizes him by the arm. Matt nearly drives his knuckles into her throat, automatic, programmed, but he stops, clenching his free hand into a fist against his leg. “Is everyone okay?”

He swallows. (— _the phone in pieces, the carton shattered, the door standing open and blood, there’s blood, and he thinks it might be Darcy’s but it’s not enough to tell him whether or not_ —) “I don’t know. I think so. I’m—I’m pretty sure everyone’s alive.”

She lets go like he’s burned her. Kate presses the back of her hand to her mouth. When she speaks, she smears purple lipstick onto her skin. “Oh my god.”

 _God didn’t have anything to do with this_ , he nearly says. _This was my fault._ “You need to stay out of sight. You might not have been a target before, like Ben was, but now you’ve been seen with me. They’re going to come after you, and I’m not about to babysit.”

“Don’t be a jackass,” Kate snaps. She wipes the lipstick off her hand onto her pants. “I know you can’t, like, help it, it’s in your programming or something, but just—don’t be a jackass.”

“I can’t risk anyone else.”

“ _You’re_ not the one risking me. _I’m_ risking me. Let’s add _patronizing_ to the list of things you don’t need to be.”

She sounds so much like Darcy that he wants to choke himself. “You’re nineteen and reckless, you’ll get yourself killed—”

“Like you’re so much older than me? Shut your mouth.” She gropes behind her, curses. “I need more arrows. I can’t work like this.”

“You’re not—”

“Shut the fuck up, Matt,” she says, and she’s tired, now. She sounds as old as the universe. “Like I said. You’re risking you, I’m risking me, and Darcy’s—” Kate heaves a breath. “She’s been like…helping you, I’m guessing. So Darcy’s risking Darcy. That’s not on you, that’s on us. Don’t be gross.”

( _You need to come back, because we need you. I need you to come back._ )

(— _please God let her be all right, I’ll never ask for anything again if only_ —)

“Fine,” Matt says, abruptly. “Stay here and watch Ben, then. They’ll come after him again, if this is what I think it’s about. He needs someone to keep an eye on him.”

“Ben’s in a Bishop apartment. The security’s insane, and he knows better than to argue with me. He won’t leave until we say it’s all clear.”

“You’re not coming along, Kate.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“I can’t let you—“

“Bullshit you can’t.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“How about _I can’t let you put yourself in danger for my fight?_ ” She pulls her last arrow free of the quiver, spins it between her fingers. He remembers hearing something somewhere about how great horned owls have talons so strong that can crush the bones of rabbits just by holding on. Not crush, pulverize. At least ten times as strong as a human grip. “How about _I can’t let you run around like a crazy person and fuck up all my plans_?”

Matt opens his mouth, and then closes it again. “I don’t really have any, at the moment.”

“That is _so_ fucking comforting.” Kate flips the arrow up into the air, and catches it. “I have my own stake in this. Which, you know, I told you. Even though you knew it already, which is…kinda weird. But I told you everything, okay? You know what I need to do. And I don’t _want_ to do it, I _need_ to do it, same as you. Same as her. Don’t you dare try to push me out of this just because you’re too fucking Catholic to handle it when someone else tries to kill us.”

(— _said she was hysterical and didn’t seem to hear anything he was saying_ —)

“I’m not arguing about this with you,” Matt says, but his voice cracks.

“You were fine working with me when I didn’t know who you were,” Kate snaps. “You were fine with me going after the drug dealers, with—with the yakuza. Why are you being so pissy about this now?”

“They could have written you off before as someone with a vendetta against drugs, not a vendetta against Fisk. Now—”

“Don’t say it like that.” She spits it out. “ _Vendetta_. Like you don’t have one.”

“What I am _trying_ to do is get him out of my city.” But that’s a lie, now, because the smell of him had been hanging in the air in Matt’s apartment, mixing up with Darcy’s, fear and tears and blood and burned skin, broken glass under his shoes, and there’s something raw and blazing inside of him, a hurricane, a black hole, drawing in everything, ripping him open from the inside out with the knowledge that _if I ever see him again I’m going to kill him, and I won’t even be sorry—_

Kate’s breathing catches, and he wonders what he looks like. He wonders what she’s seeing in the twist to his mouth. “And what _I’m_ trying to do,” she says, “is help you. And her.”

Part of that’s a lie, but he doesn’t think it’s the _her_ part. “That’s not a good enough reason.”

She stills. Her throat works. “Fine,” she says. “Is _he owns the man who raped me_ a better reason?”

Matt closes his eyes behind his mask. “Kate.”

“Is _he’s a sickness and he needs to go_ a better reason?” Her voice goes higher, scratching. “Is _I want to help because I’m a decent fucking human being and he’s a monster_ a better fucking reason? What the _hell_ kind of reason are you looking for?”

( _I think we’re all the devil, now,_ she’d said. _Five of us,_ him, her, Foggy, Karen, and Kate, Kate Bishop, the girl who’s turned into so much more than a client for Darcy that he doesn’t think she’s ever going to leave. The tang of ink under his tongue and Darcy curled on her side, watching him as he touched her arm, her throat, her back, tracing out the lines and angles and sketches of the tattoos, the brands she’s made for herself. _I have one for everyone who changed my life somehow. Even the bad people. I’m working on one for Kate right now._ )

“I don’t know,” he says, and Kate deflates. It all flares out of her in one breath, the fury, and she shuts her eyes and presses her knuckles to her forehead and breathes. Matt listens, tries to think, but the mask is squeezing at his skull. He yanks it off, and lets it dangle between his fingers. “I don’t know.”

Kate watches him through narrowed eyes. She licks her lips. “Something happened that you aren’t telling me. What?”

“Not really a sharer.”

“Yeah. Starting to get that.” She rolls the arrow between her palms. “What happened to her?”

( _I guess I’ll see you at home._ )

“I don’t know,” Matt says again. He bends, pressing the heels of his gloved hands into his eyes, just for a moment. Kate doesn’t speak, or move, or breathe. She just watches, carefully. He shouldn’t be doing this in front of someone he doesn’t know, someone he doesn’t even have reason to like all that much, but he’s shaking, and the rain hanging in the air is strangling him, and Darcy’s been hurt, and it’s his fault. He wants to cut himself open and peel the monster out of him. He wants to sink a blade into Fisk’s mouth and have it come out the other side. “I don’t know what happened.”

Kate starts to shake. “She’s okay, though?”

“I don’t know.”

“How the fuck don’t you know?”

“Because _I fucked up_!” It breaks free of him like a limb. Kate shuts up. “I knew I could get her killed and I risked it anyway and now I don’t even know if she’s—I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what he did to her, I don’t know—I don’t know _any_ of it, Bishop, all right, so _stop fucking asking_!”

She rolls the arrow between her fingers again. Then she slips it back into the quiver, and reaches out with one hand. She tugs the mask free of his fingers without much effort. He can’t hold onto it, not right now. Kate spreads it between her hands, smoothing her thumb over the fabric. Matt breathes, in through his nose, out through his mouth, and finally drops his hands.

“Do you need one of these?” she says. “To do this.”

He flexes his hands, into fists, out again. Then he takes it back from her. “It helps.”

“I don’t like it.” She hooks a strand of hair back out of her face. “It looks uncomfortable. And plus there’s the whole—”

She gestures at her eyes with one sweep of her hand, doesn’t assume he can’t see her do it. He’s not sure if that makes this easier, or harder. “She’s staying somewhere.” Matt pulls the hood back over his head, settling it, keeping his eyes closed. “With a friend.”

“You have a friend? With your winning personality?” Kate snorts. “Can’t imagine.”

He’d told Stick he had three, but with Claire, and maybe Kate—“Only five, but, you know, if they died I’d fall apart. So. They count.”

“Wow” She rocks back onto her heels. “You’re just a bright ray of sunshine, aren’t you, counselor?”

“Are you gonna drop that anytime soon?”

“Are you going to quit being a jackass?”

“I’ll quit being a jackass,” Matt says, “when you quit thinking that you’re a good driver.”

“Fuck you,” says Kate brightly. It’s not an apology, not really, but it’s as close as he can come right now, and he’s just grateful she knows that. “Tell me where to meet you. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“It’s an apartment near the hospital.” He tells her the address the same way he did Karen, block first, then building, then apartment number. “Don’t come straight at it. They might be watching where you live. They can’t track you.”

“I was like—the champion at spot-the-stalker during my debutante classes. I think I’ll be okay.” Kate plucks aimlessly at her sweater for a moment, and then swallows. “If—if she’s not okay, tell me, okay? Call me. Before I get there.”

“Okay.”

“You swear?”

“You mean a lot to her,” he tells Kate, and she shivers from scalp to toes. “I’ll tell you if she’s—if something’s wrong.”

Kate tugs at her sleeve again, at a hole in the cuff. Then she nods. When Matt starts for the ladder again (because if he’s going up, she’s going down, and he’s pretty sure she knows that on instinct judging by how she’s leaning towards the stairs) she says, “Hey.”

He stops. “What?”

“She loves you,” Kate says. It’s sharp and cold as an icicle. “You know that, right? Please tell me you know that.”

( _What’s that for?_

_I don’t know. Maybe I like you._

_Maybe?_

_Maybe.)_

“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “I don’t know why, but—yes. I know.”

She searches his face, tips her head like an owl. The lone arrow clatters in the quiver. “You love her too.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” says Kate, flatly. “Then if you hurt her, you’ll _want_ me to kill you. That works for me.”

She’s clattering down the stairs before Matt can respond. It’s only once she’s down in the alley that he thinks, _You should have killed me years ago, then._

“Don’t be stupid,” he calls after her. “Stay out of sight.”

Kate flips him off, and turns out into the street.


	10. Point Zero - Aramis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: general blanket warning for Mattness draped here. Also, some discussion of previous assault and vague mention of childhood sexual assault. (Mickey, again.) 
> 
> FINALLY. FINALLY I WROTE THIS. F I N A L L Y.

It starts because Foggy wants burritos, and because if Darcy keeps staring at her Russian history textbook she’s going to set the thing on fire. Even without his senses, he’d be able to tell that much just from the noises she’s making, sharp and impatient and disgusted with every turn of the page. (“Lenin,” she says darkly four pages into it. Fourteen pages after that: “Trotsky.” And another ten pages after that: “ _Fucking Stalin._ ”) Foggy’s sprained his wrist playing handball with some of the other guys on their floor, so he can’t carry all four burritos back alone (or six, since Darcy will probably get a second for herself, and so will Foggy if the noises Foggy’s stomach is making are any indication) Darcy slams her book shut and bounces up out of her chair. “Cocaine burritos?”

“Cocaine burritos.”

“They’re not made with cocaine,” Jen says from her end of the dining table. She doesn’t usually join them when they study, but today, it seems, is an exception. He’s not entirely sure why yet, but it is. “You would taste it if they were made with cocaine.”

“Well, heroin, then,” Darcy says, because that makes total sense. “Or possibly some sort of chemical compound hitherto unknown to humans.”

“Or krokodil,” says Foggy.

“If that were the case we’d be eating each other’s faces instead of the drugs.”

“Marci does call you _Foggy-Bear,_ ” Matt says, without lifting his face from his print-outs. Foggy huffs through his noise, blood rushing into his throat, changing the color of his skin.

“Can we not go there?”

“No,” says Darcy, sounding delighted. “No, let’s—let’s go there. Since when has she been calling you _Foggy-Bear?_ ”

“This isn’t happening.” Foggy stares hard at the ceiling. “This is an alternate dimension.”

“Babe, you are in no way that lucky. Is this some kind of weird kink? Is she just that into animal rights?”

“We’re not talking about my sex life right now.”

“Your sex life is the only interesting thing to come up in the past three hours.” Darcy pauses, and a wicked smile curves her lips. “That’s what she said. Anyway, spill, Foggy-Bear.”

“God, it’s even worse when you say that. Please don’t say that. I will actually _pay_ you not to say that.”

“We’ll be back,” Darcy says, and she drops a kiss to the top of Jen’s head. She kisses Matt, too, too fast for him to really feel (it buzzes through him anyway, though, scalp to ribs to feet, and he flexes his fingers once she’s not looking, folding and unfolding in an effort to find something to touch), before linking her arm through Foggy’s and dragging him out the door. Jen doesn’t look up from her papers, just hums and says goodbye softly under her breath in Greek. Later, whenever he hears Jen use Greek, it makes the hair on the back of his neck rise, but for now—now, it’s just another part of this tiny apartment, the same way Darla is, the same way the couch is and the TV and the dryer that you have to kick in order to get it to start properly. Matt curves around his cup of coffee. It’s the one really extravagant thing that Jen and Darcy do, expensive coffee, and Darcy and Jen’s apartment is the only place he bothers with milk. It feels offensive not to doctor the coffee as much as he would like, here.

It’s been a long time since it’s just been him and Jen in a room. Usually Darcy’s there as a buffer, or Foggy. It’s not that they don’t get along, him and Jen. They’re a little too similar in some ways and far too disparate in others, but they get along fine. For a minute or two (long enough that Foggy and Darcy have hit the first floor, Darcy still asking, asking, asking—“Do you think Marci and I would get along, or—?” “You’re seriously asking me that right now? Seriously.”) there’s nothing but silence. Then Jen clears her throat. “Matthew.”

Matt tips his head at her, not lifting his fingers from his braille reader. Jen’s caught her bottom lip between her teeth, her one big tell. _Worried,_ he thinks. Also: _stubborn._ “You’re in a mood.”

“I’m in a mood?”

“Usually you’re not this quiet.”

He stops. Matt draws his hands away from the table, slipping them beneath where he can hide the bruises. It’s too obvious a move, especially with a defense attorney, but he doesn’t particularly care at the moment. ( _Cartilage and bone crumbling under his knuckles and the cloth smooth and soft against his eyelids,_ touch her again and you’ll wish I’d killed you _, and Darcy’s lips on his cheek, touching blood, touching—_ ) “Haven’t slept very well the past week. Finals.” Finals and the fact that even with Darcy layered all over the room he can still catch hints of her on his sheets, on the shirt he’d been wearing, traces of her shampoo on the pillow. _I’ll stay with you, if you need me to._ He can feel her fingers curled against his heart. It’s been a week and the feeling still won’t leave. It smears and stains and stays, embedded, tattooed. Matt lifts an eyebrow at Jen. “You want me to talk?”

“No, I like you quiet. You’re less irritating th-that way.”

He laughs. “Glad to be of service.”

Jen looks down at her papers again. She snaps one of her remaining fingernails, and doesn’t seem to notice. She decides in a click of teeth and a deep breath through her nose, and Matt braces himself for whatever it is. “What, Jen?”

“Hm?”

“I’m blind, not deaf. I can hear you fretting.”

“I’m not fretting. Just—considering something.” She stares at her paperwork, unblinking. Then she pushes her shoulders back, the way she does in a courtroom. “You’d do anything for either of them, wouldn’t you?”

That’s…not exactly what he expected. Though he can’t really say he _expected_ anything. Matt tips his chair back, balancing with the ball of his right foot pressed to the tile floor. “For who?”

“Foggy and D-Darcy.”

He can’t help it. Something bubbles up into his mouth that could be a scream. It comes out as a laugh, and not even one that verges on hysteria, either. Matt curls his hands under the table. “What kind of question is that? Of course I’d do anything for them. They’re my best friends.”

It sounds inadequate. They’re his best friends. Partners and allies and family in one. They’re laughter in the middle of the night and phone calls at four in the morning and waking up to find Darcy starfished across the floor of their dorm room because she just can’t sleep in one place. They’re scents and sounds and warmth on either side. They’re more than a little of everything. There aren’t really words that can say that, not in any language he knows. So he keeps his mouth shut. Judging by the way Jen’s looking at him, she might have put most of it together already. She starts bouncing one leg underneath the table. “You’d do anything for them and they’d d-do anything for you.”

“We’re not the Three Musketeers.”

“Oh, hush, Aramis.” There’s an odd expression on her face, almost thoughtful. “Friendships like that—they give you a lot of power over a person.”

“Is there a point to this conversation?”

“You could break her,” says Jen, levelly. Matt goes abruptly, stupidly still. “If you wanted to. You could break Darcy into little b-bits, grind her up and pour her out like sand. I don’t think even she knows how badly you could do it. But I can see it, even if you can’t, or she won’t. And if she ever winds up hurt because of you, if whatever it is you’re hiding harms her in any way, I promise you that I’ll tear you apart with my b-bare hands.”

Matt can’t speak. His fingers feel a little numb. _Ah,_ he thinks.  _Thus the exception._ Jen doesn’t say anything else, not for a long time. She just starts highlighting certain phrases in her brief. It takes a while before he gets control of his tongue again. “That’s…violent.”

“I have hidden depths.” She waits. “Do you think I don’t mean it?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever not meant a threat.”

She inclines her head once, not to him, just to herself. “It’s good that you know that much, at least.”

 _At least,_ he thinks. “What brought that on? Did Darcy say something?”

“So far as I can t-tell, Darcy’s absolutely fine. Which you also know.” Jen shifts her glasses against her cheek. “I just figured it would be a while before I could catch you alone, so it ought to be said now rather than later. You’re a lot less defensive than I expected.”

“I don’t usually get threatened with death by a defense attorney. It’s a little disorienting.”

She snorts. “Don’t get sassy, now.”

Matt shuts up. His heart’s pounding, trilling in his throat. Carefully, he rests his palms to the table again. If he’s going to lie, he’s going to do it without acting like he has something to hide. “I’d never do anything to hurt her. I really hope you know that.”

“I do.”

“Then why the threats?”

“I don’t know.” Jen turns the page, and taps at the header with the lid of her highlighter. “I saw something that made me think.”

She doesn’t elaborate. Matt knows better than to ask. If Jen Walters doesn’t want to say something, then she’s not going to say it, and there’s no way to change her mind. (Half a dozen things he’s said or thought or felt in the past fifteen minutes swirl through his head, though, and he can’t help sorting through them, wondering which one of them gave him away when not even Foggy has said anything beyond _wait, holy shit, did you guys have sex_ which is the _last thing_ he needs to be thinking about, at the moment, or ever, especially ever, and _which one_ —) “You know, we’ve—the three of us have been friends for three years, not three months.”

“Believe me, I’m aware.” She spins her highlighter between her fingers, and then strikes through half a paragraph. “We never used to buy so much flour before she ad-dopted you two. Late night pancake parties have definitely gone up in regularity.”

Usually Jen’s the one that makes pancakes in the middle of the night, but he doesn’t think mentioning that right now is a very good idea. “Nothing—neither of us would ever want to hurt her, not Foggy or me. You don’t have to worry.”

“I’m not talking to Foggy,” says Jen, looking up again. “I’m not t-talking to Darcy, either. I’m talking to you.”

Like that’s not ominous. “Why me?”

“Divide and conquer,” she says. “Besides. I think you’re the one that really needs to talk about it. Especially after earlier.”

 _Earlier?_ Matt presses his lips together, trying to think. _Earlier_ could mean anything. _Earlier_ could mean everything, with Jen. Jen’s razor-sharp, observant as hell, a good damn defense attorney and the sort of family that people would kill for. He fights the urge to hide his hands under the table, his hands that are still bruised from the week before, from Mickey’s father and the gravel of the train yard. (He’d explained that with a bike accident, hitting the ground hard and sideways, and mostly people have bought it. Mostly, he thinks, aside from Jen. And Darcy, who still hasn’t asked.)

(He wants her to ask but he doesn’t because _what would you think of me_ —)  

“What makes you think I need to talk?” he says, finally, and Jen snorts. The cat slinks in from the living room, and leaps up into Jen’s lap. She scritches her nails through Darla’s fur.

“It’s all over your face, Matthew,” she says, and she sounds almost fond. “You’re very good, but I’ve known you as long as you’ve known her. I’m t-talking to you, and you know exactly why.”

His mouth goes sticky, uncomfortable. “I actually really don’t.”

“Cute,” says Jen. She bends around the cat, and Darla starts to purr. It’s too low for human ears, yet, but Matt can hear it. It buzzes in his ribs like a vacuum cleaner. “Really cute, Matthew. We can play it that way if you want. I don’t have a problem with it. The last thing I want to do is talk about feelings with you. I just want to be absolutely clear with you about this.”

“About bare-handed dismemberment.”

“I know you don’t believe me.” Darla pushes her head up into Jen’s palm. She’s going to bite, soon. He can tell in the way her claws are furling and unfurling, digging into Jen’s jeans. The cat always trills just a little before snapping, and that stupid noise is echoing in his rattling skull. “That’s okay. I didn’t really expect you to b-believe me. But I meant it. Regardless of the circumstances. If she ends up hurt because of you, or your secrets—whatever they are,” she adds, sharply, and he can’t work out whether he should break and run or stand and fight or both, “and to be honest I d-don’t want to know about those, either—then I won’t be on your side. I’ll be on hers. And no matter what she asks me to do, or not d-do, I _will_ come after you, and you won’t enjoy it when I catch up.”

Matt lowers his head. Jen’s staring over the top of her rimless glasses, waiting for a response that he doesn’t know how to give. _I would never hurt her_ , he wants to say. _Not ever if I could help it._ But he thinks Jen knows that part already, just judging from how she’s watching him, not wary, just waiting. Not even for an answer, he thinks. An acknowledgment. He wets his lips, and then nods, once, only once, because he can’t really manage anything more. Jen eyes him for a heartbeat longer, and then looks down at her brief.

It’s twenty minutes later and he can hear Foggy and Darcy laughing at the top of the hallway when he says, “Can I ask you something?”

“You already have by my count.”

“Funny.” He circles the spoon in the cup. His coffee’s cooling, now. He can’t bring himself to touch it at the moment. “What did you see?”

“Hm?”

“Earlier, you said—” the words stick on the roof of his mouth. “You said you saw something that made you think. What was it?”

Jen strokes a hand down Darla’s back once, twice, three times. Then she caps her highlighter. “If you want to keep it a secret,” she says, “you really shouldn’t smile at her the way you do.”

She shoves the cat off and goes to meet Darcy and Foggy at the door, and for ten breathless seconds he tries to get a hold of himself. By the time Jen comes back in, and Foggy hands over his burrito, there’s no sign of any of his turmoil on his face. But inside—god. Inside he’s spiraling.

“You okay?” Darcy says, and she stands next to his chair with her side braced into his shoulder because she’s always done that, she probably always will. Matt turns his face up to her, and keeps his smile small and loose, because he doesn’t dare do otherwise.

“I’m fine,” he lies, and from the doorway, Jen makes a clicking noise in the back of her throat.


	11. Revelations 12:9 - Shattering

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Description of healing wounds (knife cuts and broken ribs), description of child abuse by a parent (past, not of the speaker), discussion of murder, discussion of post-death putrefaction/decomposition, blood, nightmares and night terrors, gun use, panic attacks (sort of), Major Angst, _literally insane amounts of self-loathing_ , Catholic Guilt(TM), and discussion of murder/assassination.
> 
> Jesus Christ, writing this was almost as agonizing as writing the original. I'm a day late, but this chapter is also twice as long as the others, so....
> 
> (Blame Christine, y'all.) 
> 
> Unbeta'ed.

Matt has to fight the urge to leave the office when he finally picks up her voicemail. “Hey,” she says, and her voice is trembling a little. He can hear a bus in the background, the hiss of hydraulics and the beeping of an open door. “So, um. I need to talk to you about something. If you—if you can make it, tonight, that would be—yeah. Just, um. Sometime tonight, all right? If you can make it.”

(She sucks in a breath, like she wants to say something else, but finally she just hangs up, and the quality of her silence lingers at the back of his neck—)

She doesn’t come back from her meeting with Kate. Karen says she texted to say she’s not feeling well, and when Foggy calls her she sounds fine, better, not as frightened, but there’s a weight hanging in his stomach that makes him slow and stupid. _I need to talk to you about something,_ she’d said, and the messages she’d left with Mike before, they’d never sounded that unsettled. _If you can make it, tonight._ He stops on her roof, listens, but she’s sitting in the living room with a cat in her lap and dread swallows him whole. _I need to talk to you about something._

It’s nothing, he tells himself. It’s something Kate said. It’s something about Goodman, about Lynch, about the case. But he’s never heard her sound quite like that before, like she’s breaking, like something in her spine has snapped. He’s _never_ heard her sound like she does in that message, and he’s known her for seven years. And he knows it’s illogical, he _knows_ it’s probably not the worst, that the likelihood is she’s frightened and something’s happened and he should get there as soon as he can, but his first thought, the one that keeps lingering, is _God, what if she’s guessed_?

But she can’t have. If she had, she’d have confronted Matt about it, not the devil. If she’d guessed, she’d be screaming at him. If she’d guessed, she wouldn’t want him near her. She wouldn’t still be calling the office, she wouldn’t be speaking to the devil, she wouldn’t be asking for help. She’d be hating him. She’d be loathing him, and she’d be right to do it, because _seven years, Matt, Jesus Christ, seven full years and you’ve never been brave enough to tell her one thing, just one thing, not about the accident, not about Elektra, not even something as simple and concrete as_ I love you, I’m sorry, please stay _, so what the hell right do you have to be scared? What the hell kind of man are you to do this to her, and to Foggy, and to Karen, even, what the hell kind of friend are you, what kind of monster are you to lie and lie and lie and get so caught up in it you can’t get free—_

It can’t be that, he tells himself. It _can’t_ be that. It can’t.

(She’d come around the desk, set her lips to his hair, smiled, _I’ll be back_ , and he could practically taste it on his tongue, the truth, clear and sharp like menthol, like mint. _I need to talk to you,_ he’d almost said. _I need to tell you something. I want you to know something. I need to tell you. I want to tell you. God, I want you to stay._ But he’d told himself, _no, not here. Not in the office, not here._ And he could have gone with her, could have taken her to a park, could have told her on the street, but no. _Tomorrow, when I have something to show her. Tomorrow._ He’s given himself so many tomorrows, but this time he means it. This time it’s real. It terrifies him, but God save him, this time is real.)

_I need to talk to you about something._

(—what the hell kind of monster are you—)

He’s a coward. Matt bolts, and runs right into Stick.

( _You think she’d ever give a shit if she knew what you were?_ )

He’s still shaking when he returns, coming up from the ground this time, hand over hand up the ladder. His knuckles are split, his mouth bloody, and bruises swell against his cheek, his jaw, his eye. Darcy’s moved, clambered out her window and settled on the fire escape. The gun rests on the grating, metal and gunpowder smeared over her fingers.

(If it were any other night he might not have the guts to do it, clamber down the ladder into questions he might not be able to answer, but it’s this night. It’s this night, there’s a child that’s dead, and his blood is on Stick’s hands, and Matt hadn’t been able to stop it. _I put an arrow in that thing’s heart,_ and Jesus Christ, _Jesus Christ,_ Stick killed a _child_ , Stick crafted the bow, aimed and fired it, and he killed a child _,_ _you don’t ever touch a child and I trusted you and you lied to me and the kid is dead and I should have stopped it—_ )

( _No, stop, please—_ )

He doesn’t make any effort to be quiet. Still, he’s only three rungs away from where she’s sitting when she finally jumps, and whips around with the gun in her hand. She’s shaking a little. Matt goes very still, just for a moment—the safety’s off, her finger’s on the trigger, and she’s breathing fast, hyperventilating, terror rolling off her skin—before he pulls himself up onto the fire escape and holds up both hands. “Hey,” he says, and then again, more slowly, because the gun is still raised and there’s no recognition, no shift in how she’s holding herself. Something cold cracks into his ribs. “Hey, it’s just me.”

Darcy swallows. There’s tension in her shoulders, in her spine. She forces the gun down, fingers cupped around the base, before she slips it into the back of her jeans. She smells like sweat and mouthwash, like she’s been running too hard, like she’s thrown up. The cold spreads from his ribs to his guts to his throat. _Coward._ He shuts his eyes behind the mask. _Coward._ He should have stayed, eight hours ago. He should have stayed. There’s something deeply, horrifyingly wrong about Darcy with a gun in her hands. He waits until she’s breathing again, until her heart’s slowed, before he curls into a knot, close but not touching. “You called. What happened?”

Darcy shakes her head. Her hair catches against her lips, and the gun presses into her back. “Wesley,” she says, and the cold, it’s all through him now. He’s hoarfrost and black ice. “Psycho Glasses Killer offered me a job.”

He’s not relieved, exactly. But it’s not a lie. She’s sounds like she’s stuck in something, some problem she hasn’t worked out yet. Why Wesley did what he did, maybe. Something else. She stammers through it, the story, and she watches him like she’s waiting for him to explode. Blood sings against his tongue. He can’t relax, for some reason. There’s acid in his stomach. _Something’s wrong that she’s not saying._ Something’s happened that she hasn’t mentioned, and it can’t be that, it _can’t_ be, if she knew, she wouldn’t dance around it like this. She wouldn’t do this. She _wouldn’t._

(She would if she were scared, he knows. She would if she weren’t sure. She’s prying, poking, trying to understand something. But if she knew, she’d run, she wouldn’t still be here, she wouldn’t still be reaching up and out and saying _Jesus, what the hell happened_ like she’s doing right now. If she knew she’d hate him, and she doesn’t hate him yet, so she must not know.)

( _It can’t be that, it can’t be, it can’t, I’m telling her tomorrow, I have to tell her, she can’t have guessed, please, God, no_ —)

“Did someone hit you with a semi-truck?” she says, and he wants to lean forward, tip into her hands, let her touch him. _Darcy, it’s me,_ he almost says. _It’s only me, please let me stay here, I need to remember that there’s something more in the world than Stick and silk and dead children and lost causes, I need to tell you, I_ want _to tell you, I can’t keep doing this, not with you, not anymore, not when you know both sides and you seem so close to being able to understand—_

(He’s a coward, he pretends that he’s not but he knows it, he knows that he’s not as brave as his father was, diving headfirst into death. He’s not as brave as his father, and he’s not as brave as Darcy, who wears her heart on her sleeve and throws herself into a fight because she can’t imagine doing anything different. She’s never drawn away from the devil, he thinks, not once, and the idea that she might understand hits him again, hits him over and over, because in the face of all that’s happened she’s unfurling like some kind of flower, dark and deadly and gorgeous, and he can’t turn away—)

“Had a disagreement,” he says, finally. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It kind of does matter.” She swallows again. “I’m gonna get the first aid kit, I’ll be right back.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I _do_ need to do that.” She scowls. “Jesus Christ, you look fucking terrible.”

 _That’s not why I’m here_ , he nearly says. _That’s not why I came here. I came because you asked, I came because you were scared, I ran because I’m a coward but I’m here now, please, don’t,_ because that’s so dangerous, that’s so very dangerous, both the possibility and the chance of it, because if she sees him she might realize—

What would happen if she does, though? If she realizes. What changes if he tells her tonight, instead of tomorrow? His insides turn over. _God, I hate lying to you._

“I won’t try to take your mask off,” she says. “Though I have absolutely no doubt that your face looks awful. I promise, okay?” Darcy licks her lips, and she’s still shaky and frightened and unsettled and searching, but her mouth curves when she says, “I won’t take your mask. Just your shirt.”

Blood spreads over his lip again. He settles into the mask of the devil. _She’s scared,_ he tells himself. _Wesley frightened her. Give her this. Don’t be a bastard. Give her this, give her something to do. And if she asks, then—then it’s so easy to explain._ “Just my shirt, huh.”

“You think I’m going to pass up a chance to ogle a superhero in the raw? Please.” She’s still a little trembly as she swings into her room, but the sass is back, at least. “Just wait there, okay? I’ll be back.”

He waits. Of course he waits. He waits, and when she comes back and beckons him inside, he follows. He only starts to remember it might be a bad idea when he’s peeling off the shirt, when he hears her breathing stutter, the way her eyes get wide. He’s a walking car accident under his clothes. Darcy touches her fingertips to the cut on his chest, the one that Claire stitched. It’s feather-light, ghostly. Matt stays very, very still. “What’s this from?”

“Glass cut. Russians.”

“Jesus.” She shifts her hand to his collarbone, one that he’d only pulled the stitches from yesterday, the day before maybe, still a little achy. She keeps swallowing, over and over, like she’s trying not to throw up. Or she’s trying not to cry. “What about this one?”

“Lucky bastard with a knife,” he says, and he nearly covers her hand with his, nearly presses her fingers against the scar. She draws back before he can give into it. Darcy turns away from him. When Matt shifts, one of the new cuts breaks open, starts to bleed. The smell snaps him out of it. 

“You need body armor. Seriously, like…all of the body armor.”

“That’s what Claire said.” The smell of the alcohol stings the inside of his nose. _Tell her,_ he thinks. _Tell her._ The words won’t come. He’s kept them inside for so long that they’ve calcified. “But it’d slow me down. It’s not like I have a magic hammer or a special shield or anything.”

“No, just your X-ray hands.” She gives him a sideways look, lingering on the scars before her eyes flick up. She’s looking at his mask, now, he thinks. She clenches her fingers a little, and then turns back to her business with the cotton balls. “Claire said something about that, told me I should ask you. If you can see through my shirt, we’re done here, dude.”

He chokes. “No, it’s not—I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“Then what do you have?” When she brushes the alcohol over the worst of the cuts, the one that’s bleeding, it _burns_. He shuts his eyes again. “Because I’ve seen you fight, remember. It’s like—I don’t know. It’s like you know what’s coming. Like you have eyes in the back of your head.”

 _You haven’t seen me fight._ That moment in the alleyway, that wasn’t a fight. That was a desperate attempt to keep control. ( _Never touch her,_ he thinks, _not ever again._ ) This isn’t something he can explain, really, not something he can manage, but then it comes back, the little voice in his head, the one that sounds like Claire. _Tell her this. She deserves to know. You hate lying to her, don’t you? Tell her._

“It’s more like—” His thoughts scatter. Matt yanks them back under control, waiting for Darcy to go back to what she was doing, waiting for her to not pay such close attention to him, to the way he’s breathing, the way he’s frozen. “—everything’s enhanced, I guess.”

 _Is this what she wanted to know?_ She listens, quietly, the tension in her hands flaring tighter and tighter. He can barely get through it, the truth. It’s not even a quarter of what he should be telling her, what she ought to know. What he wants her to know. But even this is leaving him reeling. Darcy digs a Band-Aid out of the box, tears it open. Her heart is spiraling, rocketing in her ribs. “Is it always like that, or just when you put on the mask?”

“Usually I can push it back, but yeah. It’s always there.” Salt and tears flush hot into the air when he cocks his head, when he shifts, and Jesus Christ, no. He’s cold, all of a sudden. He’s freezing cold. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She’s talking like she’s breaking again. “Why wouldn’t I be fine? You’re the one who had your ribs kicked in.”

“I don’t know,” he says. He wants to run. That, or take off his gloves and wipe the dampness from her cheeks, because she’s about to cry, and he has a sickening, lurching feeling that he knows exactly why. _Tell her, tell her, tell her._ But the words won’t fucking come. “You smell like tears.”

“That’s so—” She makes an odd little sound, half crushed. “—you can seriously smell that?”

“Yeah.”

Darcy spills alcohol on to the desk. She doesn’t notice. “And—and you’ve always been like this?”

 _Christ, no._ “Long enough.” He doesn’t think about it when he reaches out, but when she flinches he nearly yanks back again. “Darcy, what’s wrong?”

“I’ve just—” Her eyes are wet. “I’ve had a really shitty night, okay? Can we drop it? I don’t—”

 _You know, don’t you?_ Something squeezes tight in his throat. _You know._ “Darcy—”

— _I’m not who you think I am, I’m me, please don’t run away—_

She _flares_. It’s the only way he can think to describe it, the buzzing rush of furious heat all through her skin, the flickering of tears on her cheeks. She jerks back from him, not a flinch, a tearing, and she slams the bottle down so hard that alcohol sprays. On the bed, Darla jerks awake, and scrambles away to hide under the mattress. “Matt,” she says, and he knows it’s coming but it still hits him like a train to the guts, still knocks the air from his lungs, “I _really don’t want to talk about this right now._ ”

He tries to take a breath, but it doesn’t work. Darcy stares at him, lips trembling, and then she whirls and stalks out of the bedroom. He can hear her moving, can hear Karen breathing slowly and quietly on the couch, Jen lifting her head from her paperwork at the sharp snap of the bathroom door and then looking down again, hooking her earbuds back in, but all of it is a haze. _You knew,_ he thinks, and he puts his head in his hands. _You knew and you came anyway. You knew and you lied anyway. This is your fault. This isn’t something you can fix. You’ve lost her._

He’s lost her.

_Love is a disease._

Darcy comes back very slowly. There’s still water on her cheeks from the sink. Strands of her hair stick to her temples. She opens the door, shuts it behind her with her foot. The cat flees. Darla might be smarter than he is. “Were you ever going to tell me?” she says, and her voice is pure rock, but it’s also brittle, fragile, so easily shattered. “Or were you going to just, you know, keep lying for as long as you know me?”

 _Christ._ “Darcy.” His tongue sticks. _I was going to,_ he nearly says, but that’s too little, too late. She’s thrumming with fury, and it’s too little, too late. “How did you figure it out?”

She doesn’t jerk back. He wonders if that’s all she expected of him. “Wesley said something.”

Matt squeezes his eyes shut, hard enough to hurt.

“I’m supposed to be smart.” She’s so close, not drawing away. He’s never heard Darcy in pain like this before. She’s standing up straight, keeping her shoulders back, facing it head on, but God, the agony in her—he can’t describe it. It’s the same awful feeling as when someone draws their nails across a blackboard. “I’m supposed to notice things about people. It’s what my job is. I’m supposed to _see_ things. But until he suggested it, it didn’t click. And it’s so fucking obvious I could scream.” She wets her lips down, and looks away from him. “So, y’know, when I was worried you were _dead_ , you were out, what, beating the shit out of people?”

 _I was out trying to understand. I was out trying to solve. I was out trying to track down the man that did it._ But he’d hurt Vladimir, and he’d liked it. He’d thought of Claire and the creaking in her ribs, and he’d held the flare to Vladimir Ranskahov because he’d liked hearing him scream. Darcy looks up at him, and then back down to her Ace bandage. “You’re the devil of Hell’s Kitchen. How the hell am I supposed to feel about that?”

“I don’t know.” He might be sick. “I’m sorry.”

It’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough. She scoffs in the back of her throat. “I’m not okay with sorries right now. Explanations are better.” Darcy drops hard onto her stool. “How are your ribs?”

“My ribs are fine.”

“Don’t give me that, I saw how you flinched.”

 _Why are you doing this?_ She jabs him hard in the ribcage, and Matt can’t help it, he yelps, because Stick broke things, he knows it, and the night just keeps getting worse and worse. “Broken rib,” she says. “Lift your arms, asshole.”

It’s not friendly. Matt obeys. Every time her fingers brush over his skin, it feels like a knife. “You didn’t answer my question,” she says, not lifting her eyes. “Were you ever going to tell anyone? Or were you, y’know, planning on ending up _dead_ and us finding out _then_?”

 _No._ Something snaps and snarls. “Of course not. Darcy, I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be in danger, I wasn’t trying to—”

“Well, I ended up in danger anyway.” She doesn’t say what he thinks she will, _don’t give me that shit_ , but he hears it all the same. “And it’s not just the _fucking vigilantism_ , Matt. You’re—” Her voice breaks again. Her fingers quiver. “You can see? Did you—did you lie about that too? Can you—are you just going around with sunglasses and a cane, just to see how people—”

Everything in him heaves. He doesn’t realize he’s grabbed her until he’s done it, but Darcy doesn’t yank back. She glares at him, furious, teary, waiting. “No. _No._ I didn’t lie about that.”

“But you can—goddammit, Matt, you can _smell me crying_. You can hear—Jesus, you said three blocks away, didn’t you? You can hear that far, and smell, and—Jesus Christ.” She’s shaking all over, buzzing with adrenalin, with rage. “Jesus, Matt, I can’t talk to you with that thing on. Take it off.”

The mask. She means the mask, he knows. But when she says it, he thinks, _all of it._ When she says it, he thinks, _peel them away, Murdock. All the lies and the pretense. Let her see what a monster you are. Then you’ll know if she’d stay._ “Darcy—“

“ _Please_ ,” she says, and she’s crying. “Just take off the fucking mask.”

He lets her slip through his fingers. Matt’s trying not to listen when he pushes the hood off, but the heave in her breathing, the way she jolts like he’s punched her—God. Darcy raises her hands and lowers them. She gulps.

“You’re the devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” she says. “You’ve—you’ve been following me around, picking assholes off my tail. You led me to Claire. You’re the one who beat the shit out of those guys in the alley. And you saved my life, and Karen’s. You’ve done _all of that_ , and you _never told me._ ”

“I was going to.” He wants to shout it. He can’t get his voice above a whisper. “I was going to tell you. Tomorrow, actually.” It’s not a lie, this time. It doesn’t taste like one. He wanted to tell her. He wants to. He wishes he could turn back time. “When—after I dealt with Lynch and Jenson, I was going to tell you.”

Her pulse flickers, skips, falls. “You swear?”

“I wouldn’t lie about that, Darcy.” God, he’s going to cry. His throat burns. “I don’t—like—keeping secrets. Not from you, anyway."

“Bullshit.” Her voice breaks again. “You kept a million secrets from me, for _years._ Jesus. Were you ever going to say anything? About what you can do, about who you are? I’ve known you for _seven years_ and you’ve _never said anything_.”

“How was I supposed to explain it? _Hi, my name’s Matt Murdock, I can smell what you had for breakfast yesterday._ How was I supposed to say that?”

“A simple _hey, I’m a mutant_ would have been fucking nice!”

“It’s not like I was born this way!”

“So, what, you’re like an experiment?”

 _I’m an accident,_ he nearly shouts. _I’m a catastrophe. I was never meant to exist._ He bites his tongue. “I don’t know what I am.”

“I know what I thought you were.” She hooks the pin into the ace bandage. “I thought you were one of the only people on the planet that would never, ever lie to me.”

He’s handed her a knife, and she’s cutting him open. He can’t stop feeling anything. He can’t stop.

“I thought you were—I thought you were a good man, a good lawyer. I thought you were my friend, Matt. That’s what I thought.”

He can’t speak. He can’t find the words. _I’m not good._ He’s never been a good man. He’s never been a good lawyer. He’s never been anything she thought he was, and watching her realize it—it’s worse than he ever thought it would be. “So?” She lifts her head, looks at him. “What do you think now?”

_Tell me._

Darcy fiddles with tape, with bandages, with alcohol. She thinks, and she bites her tongue, chews the inside of her cheek and keeps working, mechanically, wiping the blood from him, putting him back together. She doesn’t hesitate. Her hands shake, but she doesn’t hesitate. She puts her hand to him, tipping him forward, and he follows without question, because she’s still touching him when he thought she’d never want to come near him, and that’s—it’s not hope, but it’s close. “I think,” she says, very, very slowly, “some part of me already knew it was you.” She smooths the tape over his eyebrow, carefully. “I think I understand why you didn’t say anything about your—your whatever-it-is that you can do. It hurts, but I think I understand it. And—” there’s another snap from her voice, another crack “—I think you meant what you said, about telling me the truth. Even if I’m _really fucking angry with you_ , that’s not something I’m going to forget.”

She sits there and looks at him, waits. He shuts his eyes to keep the tears back, and lets out a breath. Darcy waits, watches. Then she turns back to her work. “I’ve been—I’ve been thinking about this all day. Whether—whether or not I can forgive you for lying.”

 _God, don’t say that. Don’t._ He’s not sure which would be worse, forgiveness, or hatred. “Darcy—”

“Just shut up for a minute.” She wets down a Q-tip. She hasn’t thrown him out, and he can’t understand it. _Why do you not despise me right now?_ He’s smelled hate, he knows how it hangs on people. He knows how it hangs on her most of all, and that’s not—whatever she’s feeling right now, hate doesn’t have anything to do with it. She’s crying, and she doesn’t seem to notice. “My brain’s been going in circles for hours. Some—some bad metro detours all up in this. And I was—I was thinking how hypocritical it would be for me to n-not be able to forgive you, because there’s shit I’ve never told you or Foggy. Not ever. And—and I didn’t do it because I didn’t want either of you to th-think less of me.”

Nightmares, he thinks. Nightmares and horrors in the dark.

“And—And Foggy especially, he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t get it. He’s—he’s one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met, Matt. He’s just genuinely _good,_ and I don’t—I didn’t want to have him hate me.”

“Foggy would never hate you.” He hesitates. “I know I never could.”

He thinks he might have pushed too far. He can’t shut up, now that he’s started. He can’t stop thinking. He can’t stop talking. The truth is a boil, and now it’s lanced, and it’s all going to drain out of him at once, too much too fast, ruining everything he’s ever tried to protect, to keep safe. _Three people,_ he thinks. _Three people out of seven billion._ _God, I wanted to tell you so many times. I nearly told you so many times. I should have. I should have said something. I’m not that good a man, and now you know, and why haven’t you sent me away?_

“I told you—” She sets her fingers to his chin, turns his face. Her hands are steady, now. “I told you I was done running away, done backing down from shit. I don’t—I don’t know if you really noticed, considering Claire and—and everything else that was going on that night, but, y’know. I did.”

“You shoved me,” he says. All his reasons for keeping her out of it had seemed so small when she’d pushed him off his feet and _raged_ at him, told him exactly where to shove it. “I noticed.” 

“When I was nine or ten—” her voice dips. There’s the South, creeping up out of her. “I lived in this neighborhood. One of the projects in Atlanta. It was—y’know, it wasn’t as bad as some parts of Hell’s Kitchen, but it was still pretty bad. Lots of gangs, lots of drugs. School was a shithole. I didn’t care much at the time. I was nine, and we’d never had much money. Trashy neighborhoods ‘r’ us.”

He doesn’t understand.

“There was—there was this boy, a few houses down from me. Eli Bletchley.” She clenches a fist. “He was a year older than me, maybe. We were the only white-looking kids in that part of the neighborhood—my dad’s Venezuelan or Puerto Rican or whatever—all my mom ever told me was that he was a South American exchange student, you know that—but I _look_ white, and I looked white then, so we hung out a lot. He was kind of an asshole, but we were kids. Y’know? And—and he was the good kind of asshole. He’d dump mud in my hair one minute and lay a bully out for me the next.”

The world fades, slowly. There’s only the rhythm of her voice. She never talks about Georgia, she never talks about her mother, she never talks about her childhood or her memories beyond New York. _You don’t have to tell me,_ he nearly says, because her hands are shaking, and she’s crying again, but he thinks if he speaks he’ll break whatever spell’s settled over this room, shadowy and toxic.

“His dad worked nights, slept during the day.” There’s the hate that’s been missing. She talks like she’s swallowing acid. It tingles in his throat. “His mom was gone, I don’t know if she died or—or she left, or whatever. It was just Eli and his dad. I came in one day looking for Eli, I don’t remember why. I know—the first thing I noticed was the smear on the linoleum. As thick as paint, almost. I—I didn’t know what it was. I touched it, smelled it. Eli had nosebleeds, sometimes. I thought that’s what it was.” She breathes, in and out, faster and faster. “I must have heard something, because—because I went to look in the living room. The TV was on, really loud. It’s why they didn’t notice me. I—I looked around the corner, and I could see the—I could see the belt. I remember that the buckle was silver, or sterling, or something. There was blood on it. Eli had a towel in his mouth so he couldn’t scream.”

 _Christ. Christ. Christ._ No, not this. Not with her. Not this. “Darcy.” And it’s almost _Darcy, please._ It’s almost _you don’t have to say this._ It’s almost a _no_. But he shuts up, and waits until she can speak again.

“Eli died,” she says. “A few months later. His dad beat him up so badly that—that his neck snapped. They found the body a few weeks after, in a garbage bag under the docks. They—the—the cops said it was because he tried to mess with the local gangs, that one of the ‘bangers did it. His dad—his dad went on the fucking _news_ , asking for his baby boy back. When Eli was _missing, presumed deceased._ ” She’s flaring again, blazing, furious. “We lived on that street for three more years. The dad changed jobs. Started working days. I used to—He used to get home around the same time as me. I’d see him drive by every day. And—and every time I saw him,” she says, carefully, clearly, “I’d imagine how I’d kill him.”   

 _No_ , some part of him thinks. _Yes,_ says another. And: _unfurling like a flower, dark and shadowy and wild._

(She’d snapped awake with a nightmare, and he’d rolled over and taken her hand, and in that moment she’d been not quite right, something had been off, and until this moment, he’s never, ever understood—)

“I thought about burning his house down,” she says. “I thought about cutting his brake-lines, so he’d drive right into traffic. I thought about beating him with a baseball bat. I thought about sneaking into his house, poisoning him. I thought about stealing a gun, or buying one from one of the ‘bangers. I thought about cutting his throat while he slept. I thought about shoving him in the way of an oncoming car.”  She twists the hem of her sleeve. “I nearly did it, a few times. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen, once, and hid it in my jacket. I stood at his back door for nearly an hour, at midnight, staring at it. But—but it was locked, when I tried it.”

 _We’re drawn to the edge,_ Elektra says. _And past it._

( _You ever touch her again, and I’ll kill you._ )

( _He wants to hurt them, the men who attacked her, and he could kill them and no one would know, he could slip into their rooms and rip them apart and no one would be able to stop him—_ )

( _Fisk,_ he thinks. _Fisk—_ )

( _Claire and Vladimir Ranskahov, the flare in his hand—_ )

( _Darcy diving right for Mallory’s eyes—_ )

( _She doesn’t stop. She’s never stopped—_ )

( _If anyone could understand all of it, if anyone will ever be able to understand both sides, it might be her, but no, he has to be wrong—_ )

“That is the _only reason_ , she says, “that I’m not telling you to get out. Because I _get it_ , okay? I _get_ —I get wanting your friends to not know a part of you that—that makes you hate yourself, or makes you scared of yourself, or whatever the fuck your powers are to you. I get that. And that is the _only_ reason why I am not asking you to get the _fuck_ out of my life, right now, for lying to me for _seven years_. So you’d better fucking appreciate it, Murdock.”

He has to work his throat over and over before he can think of even a single word to say. “Okay.”

“I am _really_ fucking angry at you.”

He can feel it. “I know.”

“And the worst part is—” for the last time, maybe, her voice breaks. “—I can’t even be all-the-way angry at you, because I’m even angrier with myself.” She lifts her hand, touches her fingertips to the bruises Stick left behind, brushing over the bone in his cheek. “Because someone else I care about was being beaten into the ground every night, and I didn’t see it.”

In the next minute, she’s gone. She leaves him there, in her room, not throwing him out, not asking him to stay, and Matt can’t move.

( _And every time I saw him, I’d imagine how I’d kill him._ )

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm wrapping this baby up at sixteen chapters because seriously, I cannot take having my heart broken once a week for much longer. The remaining scenes I want to do are something from Crucifixion, something with Fisk and possibly with Vanessa, a scene with Claire, a scene with Karen, and a scene with Foggy because poor Foggy has been neglected this whole damn time, but I'm open to new suggestions. What do you guys want to see next?


	12. Bloody, Bold, and Resolute - Wreckage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day late, a dollar short, blah blah blah.
> 
> If y'all haven't read _take one sip (dream of this counterfeit)_ in the TMoM series, I suggest doing that? Since this comes right after that, and you'll be a bit confused if you haven't. 
> 
> (A summary for those who are too lazy: If you'll recall, Karen runs off after Foggy surprises her and Darcy in the office. Darcy asks Matt to go after her. Matt chases Karen for like...half an hour, because Karen won't stop running, and when they stop, Karen starts screaming about how everyone has lied to her. Matt takes off the mask. Karen punches him in the face.) 
> 
> Trigger warnings: emotional meltdowns, adrenalin, shock, discussion of scrapes and bruising, mentions of stitch jobs, mentions of blood, etc. Karen just needs hugs.

Karen’s very quiet when he opens the roof access door, and steps aside to let her in. She’s barefoot, and blood—blood and asphalt and everything else, but the blood is strongest, from the tear on her knee and the scrapes on her feet—trails after her as she starts down the stairs, picking her way around the mess left behind by Stick. It’s a contrast, he thinks, to the Karen who had stayed in his bed that first night. That Karen had been steady, even if she’d been upset, even if her heart had been skipping and salt and fear had been clinging to her skin. This Karen doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do, and God, there’s gunpowder on her hands.

“Sorry about the mess,” Matt says, because he can’t think of what else to say. They’ve cleaned up as much as they can, but there’s still a hole in the floor, and one of the windows has cardboard taped over it from where Darcy broke it to get him inside. “It’s been—”

He stops. What does he even say? _It’s been a weird few days._ The last time Karen had been in here, she’d come to see Darcy, the morning after Nobu. She’s seen it worse.

“It’s okay,” she says, in a dull little voice that’s somehow even worse than how she’d sounded at the very start. _If you’re with them,_ she’d said, _then I’m dead already_ , but now she stinks of gunpowder and cologne and blood and some kind of sedative, like metal, like the waterfront, and no: someone else is dead, aren’t they? Not Karen. Someone else. He bites the inside of his cheek to keep from asking. “I don’t mind.”

His whole body hurts. _Shouldn’t have run so fast in stitches, idiot_ , he thinks, and he can’t tell if the voice is Claire, or Darcy, or himself. When he touches his hand to the bandage, pain thrums like a plucked string. He’s busted a stitch. Only one, though, as opposed to three. It’s a miracle. At least this one he can fix himself. Matt leaves his hood on the counter, along with the gloves. He doesn’t quite know what to say. “You want anything to change into?”

Karen’s throat works. She crosses her arms over her chest. “Um. Yeah, that—yeah.”

He passes in front of her on the way to the bedroom, and Karen shies back. He’s not sure if it’s because she doesn’t recognize him, really, or because she’s still buzzing with adrenalin (because she is, he can hear her heart pounding, smell it on her, like copper and sweat) but he has to bite his cheek again to keep from reacting to it. She turns towards the window as soon as he’s out of her line of sight, looking out at the billboard. When she takes a step, she leaves a few smears of blood behind on the wood. Karen doesn’t notice.

“You’re—” she stops. Matt peels his shirt up over his head, slowly, ignoring the twinges. “How do you work?”

Matt stills, for a moment. Then he touches his fingers to the gauze again, and finds a fresh shirt. Loose, so she won’t be able to tell he’s bleeding. “How do I work?”

“You’re blind.” Karen turns her face towards the bedroom, and then away again. She’s shivering. “That’s—your eyes, that’s not something you can fake. So how do you work?”

He slings the cargo pants into the laundry basket, changes into sweatpants. It’s with a second T-shirt and shorts he’s pretty sure Darcy left here ages ago in hand that he returns to the living room. “Accident,” he says, and holds the clothes out to her without a word. Karen reaches out, and then looks down at her hands. She hiccups.  

“I’ll, um. I’ll bleed on them.”

Of course. He’s not thinking. Matt sets the clothes aside. “Sit down,” he says, and Karen’s too tired to argue with him. _They’re all lying to me._ It keeps echoing in his head. _All of them, Fisk and—and Wesley and everyone else, everyone I’m supposed to trust_. Karen sits, and Matt gets the first aid kit out from under the couch, ferreting out the disinfectant. Instead of taking her hand, though, he offers her the packet. Karen looks at it, and then lifts her face.

“Thanks,” she says, finally, and takes it from him. It takes her a few tries to open the thing, but she does, and she hisses between her teeth when alcohol sings into the cuts. She wipes off blood and dirt and concrete, gunpowder and grime and dust, half a dozen other things that he doesn’t want to parse out. They linger, ground into her skin. He gives her another one, and pushes his glasses up his nose.

“There was an accident,” he says again. Karen stills for a moment, and then goes to town with the towelette. He thinks they might end up using the whole box, if she keeps at it like this. She’s scraping at her skin like she’s trying to scrub something out of herself. “I told you I wasn’t always blind. Just—the chemicals that blinded me did…other things.”

Karen looks at the used towelettes in her lap. She stands, and flexes her hands, in and out. The scores aren’t deep enough to need band-aids, he thinks. They’ve already stopped bleeding. Karen holds one hand close to her face, and for a moment he can almost imagine the lights that Darcy and Foggy have always complained about, lighting her up from behind like some kind of religious idol. Her hair hangs around her face in a curtain. “Other things that turned you into some kind of fisticuffy badass?” she says, and something catches in his throat. Matt shuts his eyes.

“It’s not—quite like that, no. Just—” _Are you going to tell Karen the truth?_ Darcy says, days ago. _You’ve totally thought about it, you just don’t want to talk about it._ “I...it’s hard to describe.”

Karen hooks her hair behind her ears, and takes the clothes off the arm of the chair. She hesitates, and then pads into the bathroom. She leaves the door open. A second or two later, a shirt comes flying out, and hits the floor of the hallway. “Try,” she says, her voice echoing. Her stockings are ripped, and those go right into the bathroom wastebasket. She makes a little sound as she peels them off her torn feet, but otherwise she just grits her teeth ( _knives over porcelain, rocks scraping against each other_ ) and bears it. “Because I don’t get it.”

“The chemical was experimental,” he says. “I’ve never found out what it was. I looked, but it was blacklisted, I couldn’t get at it. All I know is that—that what I can’t see, the rest of my senses…fill in.”

She stops, hands on the sink. Then she thieves one of the hair ties Darcy’s left behind, and winds her hair back up off her neck. Karen touches a spot on her throat, and hisses a little. _There,_ he thinks. Whatever sedative’s still humming through her, that’s where it was injected. Something cool and metallic winds its way through him, hissing. “So, what, you echolocate? Like a bat?”

“Something like that.” He hesitates. “Bats rely on hearing, though. It’s—I don’t just hear.”

“So, it’s—everything?”

“Yeah.”

She creeps back out of the bathroom, and settles in the armchair, drawing her knees up against her chest like a child does when they wake up from a nightmare. “And the fisticuffs?”

“Practice.” He stands, and offers her the first aid kit again. Karen looks at it for a long time before taking the box with both hands, and resting it on the arm of the chair. “I had a teacher.”

Karen’s very quiet as she wipes the dirt and gravel from her feet. After Foggy’s fury, and Darcy’s low, drawling rage, he’s not sure what to make of this considering silence. She’s thrown another two rags onto the makeshift table before she licks her lips. Blood stings into the air again when a scab splits. “This is what Foggy is angry about, isn’t it?”

Matt closes his eyes again. He nods, once. She considers that, too, carefully, turning it over and over in her head.

“I should be angrier,” she says after a moment. Karen opens another towelette. She sounds curious, tipping her head and looking down at her feet as if she’s never seen them before. There’s another gash on her shin that smells like asphalt. Her voice scrapes, still. “I think I should be angrier.”

He doesn’t really have anything to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all. Karen looks up at him. His shirt drowns her. She’s very small, this way. Exhausted, he thinks. (She’d pressed her face into her hands and screamed until she couldn’t breathe, screamed and sobbed and raged at him, at whoever put the gunpowder on her hands, at herself. He’s not surprised she’s tired. Guilt, hot and salty, ranges up his throat and into his mouth like he’s going to vomit. _Christ, what have I done to all of them?_ Foggy, staring at him like he’s a stranger. Darcy, lungs heaving, shutting her eyes and turning away. And now Karen, screaming and screaming and screaming until she couldn’t even keep her feet anymore. _What have I done to you?_ ) She wipes dirt out from between her toes, and then heaves a breath.

“You’re the one who stopped Rance from killing me,” she says. “When—back when Danny—”

She stops.

“I told you I would keep you safe,” he says. For some reason, she shudders from her head all the way to her feet, shutting her eyes and trying to breathe. “I told you that and I meant it. I just—didn’t tell you how.”

“So you brought me here to—to keep an eye on me, that first night?”

“Foggy would have volunteered.” Matt folds his hands, presses his thumbs hard into the space between his eyebrows. “He would have. He was going to. We didn’t know who they were, not back then, but—but anyone who could get a cop to try and kill a prisoner wasn’t someone I wanted Foggy tangling with. It—it was the safer option.”

Karen goes quiet again. She finishes the last towelette, and puts her feet back on the floor, folding her hands together as if she wants to pray. Considering everything, he wouldn’t be surprised. Somehow, though, he doesn’t think Karen’s very religious. “And you—followed me back to my apartment?”

He lifts one shoulder in half a shrug. “I didn’t—I wasn’t using you as bait.”

“I didn’t think you were.” For the first time, there’s an edge to her voice that reminds him of the Karen who bosses Foggy around, who snorts when she laughs too hard and flings an arm around Darcy’s shoulders at the end of a long day. “Christ, Matt.”

The split on the inside of his mouth from where she’d punched him stings. Matt stands, abrupt, and heads into the kitchen. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“Well, I don’t.” She closes her eyes, presses her fingers into the lids for a moment. Then she leans back in the chair, rubbing her hands together as if she’s trying to get blood back into her fingers. Her temperature hasn’t risen, yet. _Shock_ , he thinks. _She’s in shock._ No wonder she’s so calm. “I don’t blame you, okay? Stop—stop making that face, it’s awful.”

“It’s my face.”

“It’s an awful face.” She looks to the window again. “Just—I don’t know. I can’t—really process anything right now.” Karen swallows. “Sorry.”

“You don’t—” He stops. “Don’t apologize. Not—not for this. You’re not the one that—”

He can’t quite finish. _You’re not the one that tore us apart,_ he thinks. _You’re not the one that lied, for years and years. You’re not the one that poisoned it all. You’re not the one who did any of that, that was me, and you don’t—you shouldn’t blame yourself for it._ Karen shuts her eyes, and salt traces down her cheek. Her eyelashes stick together. It takes a long time before she gets up.

“Can I—um.” She hooks her hands together. “I kind of—I’d like to shower.”

He opens his mouth, and closes it again. “Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “There are towels in the cabinet.”

She nods once, and vanishes back into the bathroom. He wants to smash something, throw a glass across the room and listen to it shatter. He doesn’t. Very, very carefully, he fills a cup with water, and leaves it on the counter.

By the time Karen gets out again (nearly forty minutes; he can hear her crying under the fall of the water, and blood works its way across his tongue, lingers between his teeth) he’s repaired the single stitch, made up the couch for himself, and left her the bed. He’s fairly certain he’s not going to be able to sleep, but he might at least pretend. He thinks about calling Darcy, but he thinks of the snatch of Foggy’s voice he’d caught just after he’d hung up, and tells himself it’d be a bad idea. (He wants to, though. He wants to very desperately, because Christ, she’s better at this than he is. She’s always been better than this. _Karen called me_ , _Matt,_ she’d said, and she’d been right. Karen had called her. Kate had drawn her aside. And he’s—hasn’t he always gone to her? Without even thinking about it, isn’t that what he’s always done? They all run to her when something goes wrong, him and Kate and now Karen too, and he thinks it might be because they know on instinct that Darcy can hold the darkest, cruelest parts of them in her open palms and not get burned. God, he wants to talk to her right now.) By the time Karen comes back out of the bathroom, her hair still wet and a towel draped around her neck, he’s perched on the edge of the couch, not sure what to do anymore. He’d anticipated more questions. He’d anticipated something—not quite this.

( _I thought you were my friend, Matt. That’s what I thought._ )

( _Wouldn’t do that if I were you. Then again, maybe I would. The hell do I know about Matt Murdock?_ )

“I don’t want to talk about it,” says Karen thickly. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about it. Before you ask. I’m—I don’t want to.”

Matt opens his mouth, and shuts it again. “Okay.”

“I don’t _ever_ want to talk about it.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll—probably have more questions for you when I’m not—when I can think.” She blinks at him, and heaves a breath like she’s going to burst into tears again. She takes another. “Um.” Karen tips her head back, looks at the ceiling. Water runs down the back of her neck, drips from her hair to the floor. “Hey, um. Matt. Can I—”

She stops. Matt heaves himself to his feet, carefully. “What?”

Karen bites her lip. She folds the towel over a handful or two of her hair, rubs until it stops spattering the wood between her feet. Then she lets it drop again. There are still odd little bursts of adrenalin buzzing through her, unpredictable and unstoppable. “I just—it’s nothing.”

“Karen.”

Karen presses her lips together to hide how they’re trembling. Then she lets out a ragged little breath, and steps around the armchair. Matt isn’t quite sure what she’s doing until she hooks her arms around him and hides her face in the collar of his shirt. It’s odd, because he’s never hugged Karen, before. Not exactly. She’s always been careful to hold herself a little bit apart, Karen, like she’s leery of being touched. Or of touching, he’s not sure. Her hair is leaving a damp spot on his shirt. Matt shuts his eyes for a moment. Very, very slowly, he sets one hand to the space between her shoulder blades, not quite sure if she wants him to touch her, not certain if she’d try to run if he does anything more. Karen shakes a little. Her fingernails scrape against the fabric of his shirt as she hooks her hands into fists around the fabric.

“We’re kind of fucked up,” she says. “Aren’t we?”

Something raw and aching swells behind his eyes. Matt huffs. When she locks her hands behind his back, starts shaking again, he leans into her a little. _Three,_ he thinks. _Three people out of seven billion._ He closes his eyes. When he rests his jaw to her hair, Karen squeezes his ribs hard enough to make the cracked ones pop. “Little bit.”

The noise she makes isn’t quite a laugh. It’s not a sob, either.

“I won’t ask,” he says, and Karen hides her face in his shoulder and breathes. “I won’t ask, okay? Just—I won’t ask.” Then, more quietly, because he doesn’t dare to say it louder: “Thank you.”

Karen doesn’t say a word. He thinks she might be trying not to cry. Neither of them let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! There are four more chapters after this. They are: 
> 
> >a scene with Claire (decided)  
> >a scene with Fisk (this one has not been decided yet, but it might be finale stuff, I'm not sure yet)  
> >a scene with Foggy (decided)  
> >Crucifixion will be last. 
> 
> I don't think I'll be able to manage anymore, tbh. I love the suggestions you guys had, but Christ, Matt is really hard to write for this much time, especially considering the emotional lows he goes through. I may come back once these next four chapters are done, add more in, but just...I don't believe I'll be able to do more than these at the moment. (Even going to look up the line from Nelson v. Murdock nearly broke me, okay.) 
> 
> See you next week!


	13. Playing Ostrich - Angles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently I thought I had added a note of "I'm taking a week break from cage!" to the last chapter. And I didn't. So now I look like a doucheface for not updating for a week. 
> 
> ...sorry?
> 
> In regards to my headcanons about Matt's sexuality: I very firmly believe that Matt is polyromantic. Regardless of my eventual decision in regards to Matt's sexual preferences (I'm fond of bisexual!Matt Murdock like you wouldn't believe, you guys, but I haven't fully decided on my headcanon in that quarter yet), I do not and will not ever think of him as anything _other_ than polyromantic. He's so goddamn Catholic and so goddamn monogamous that he himself takes issue with it, because he feels like he's doing something wrong, but just...gah. 
> 
> I tagged it a while ago, but yeah. Polyromantic Matt Murdock. All aboard the train. 
> 
> Trigger warnings: Um...I feel like if you've read the previous chapters, y'all will be fine. 
> 
> I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with how this one came out, but I fucking love Claire Temple.

She’s finally asleep again. Matt leans back against the edge of the couch, arms on his knees, listening. In the apartment above Claire’s, Santino’s awake and moving; he’s pacing, hands in his pockets, muttering under his breath in Spanish as he works through theories of what the hell has been going on down here. Matt can’t blame him for it, not really—he’s young, but he’s not a kid, and there are three lawyers and a secretary sprawled across Claire’s living room floor like some kind of twisted slumber party, post-attempted murder and post-car chase. (Neither Kate nor Foggy could find the video feed that had been submitted to the local news because _none_ of the feed has actually made the news—Fisk, again, he’s sure—but his whole body aches from it, bruises on his hands and his broken ribs making noises like they’re snapping all over again every time he takes a breath. The bullet crease on his cheek—Christ. Too close. Far too close. Never, never again.) Darcy’s not dreaming, not yet, but in Claire’s room, Karen is. Foggy’s out entirely, snoring a little.

(“She told me,” Foggy had said, once Darcy had fallen asleep the first time. Matt knew, of course. He’d heard it. But he’d still inclined his head once, because Christ, Foggy’s talking to him, and he’d thought he never would again. “Wait, but you—you probably heard that bit, huh.”

“Kind of hard not to,” Matt had said. Foggy scoffed, turned his face away for a moment. Then he’d shifted around again, brushing some of Darcy’s hair back up out of her face. Bruises and blood and split lips and _Christ, it happened again and you couldn’t stop it_ —

 _Don’t think about that right now._ His heart's still beating far too fast.  _Don't think about it. Think of a plan. If you stop to think about it, it'll break you._

“You hurt her,” Foggy had said, “and I don’t—I don’t know what I can do to you, but I swear to God I will make you regret ever being born, Matt,” and Matt hadn’t been able to do anything. Something’s still bubbling in his throat that might be hysterical laughter. It was Kate all over again, Kate taking a breath and saying, _if you hurt her, you’ll want me to kill you,_ and just—God.

“I know, Foggy,” he’d said, and Foggy hadn’t said anything else. He’d clenched his teeth and bit his tongue and turned his back to Matt, and it’s all he could have expected, really. It still felt like someone taking sandpaper to his insides.)

Claire’s the only one still awake. She’s lurking in the kitchen, not doing anything, really, just standing and staring out the window, hands braced against the counter. She’s healed. He can’t smell blood on her anymore, and the creak to her breathing has faded. It’s still there—it’ll probably always be there, miniscule, healed breaks and tiny cracks—but it’s much, much better. He can’t think of what to say, so he’s done what he’s always done, and said nothing. Claire doesn’t seem to know either, because she’s opened her mouth and then shut it again three times in the past hour alone. She does it again, and then stops herself, curling her hands up into fists, her fingernails too short to do more than prick at her skin.

“What,” Matt says finally, because he can’t stand the silence anymore. Next to him on the floor, Darcy twitches, but when he puts a hand to her hair she falls quiet again. “What is it you want to say?”

Claire turns her head towards him, and watches him for a while. She licks her lips, pushing away from the counter. “Santino’s all right.”

“They weren’t going to let anyone hurt him.”

“Right,” Claire says, and it’s the same dry little voice that had caught his attention in the first place, the same wry, done-with-your-bullshit attitude that she’s kept this whole time, despite all the shit he’s put her through, despite everything that’s happened to her because of what he’s done. “Forgot. Because clearly your friends are the safest they’ve ever been.”

Matt flinches. He can’t help it. ( _I knew I could get her killed and I risked it anyway_ , he’d said to Kate, because he loves her too goddamn much and God, this is the thing that’s kept him up, this is the nightmare that’s neverending, Darcy and Foggy and Karen and Claire getting hurt and nearly dying because he’s failed at his goddamn job, _don't think about it, not right now, don't_ —) In the kitchen, Claire shuts her eyes for a moment, and says, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I mean.” Matt tips his head back against the pillows. His neck aches. “You’re not wrong.”

Claire doesn’t say anything for a minute or two. She goes through the fridge until she finds a carton of yogurt, knocks the door shut again with her hip. “This what you always do when something goes wrong? Get snarky and self-deprecating?”

“Why waste a talent?”

“Hell of a talent.” Claire slinks out of the kitchen, and settles on the end of the couch, curling into the arm of it. She smells like beeswax and rubbing alcohol even after Albany, like it’s tattooed into her skin, like it’s so crusted underneath her nails and so tangled in her hair that you’d have to burn her alive to get the hospital out of her. _She fixes people,_ he thinks. _She fixes people. I ruin them._ The fact that every person on the planet that he cares about is hiding out on her floor is kind of a testament to the kind of people they both are.

“Why did you give Darcy the key to this place?” he says. It’s not really what he meant to say—he’s not sure he meant to say anything, to be honest; all his words are used up—but it’s what comes out. Claire blinks again, slowly, and twirls her spoon in her yogurt.

“I like her.” She resettles against the cushions, propping her elbow against the back of the couch to hook her hair out of her face. There’s fresh tattoo ink and blood and punctured skin on her wrist. Something new. It’s still too raw for him to make out anything other than a vague ring. “That weird for you to hear?”

It probably should be. It should be stranger. The last time he’d seen Claire he’d left her behind in his apartment and there had been salt on her cheeks. _I just don’t think I can let myself fall in love with someone who’s so damn close to becoming what he hates,_ and he knows she’s right. She was right then and she’s right now, even if she hasn’t said it. He turns his head, tips his face up to her. “Would it bother you if I said no?”

Claire watches him, unblinking, turning her mug between her hands. Then she sighs. “C’mon,” she says, and unfolds herself again. “Kitchen. I want to check your stitches.”

“They’re fine, Claire.”

“I’m sure they are. I taught her. I want to see them because she’s had enough of a week and she doesn’t need to worry about you on top of it.”

He flinches again, and that in and of itself makes him jump. He’s stopped pretending with all of them, he realizes. He keeps the mask up when he needs to, but he doesn’t hide physically anymore. Stick would call it sloppy, but he’s pretty sure that his dad would call it trust. Matt turns his head to Darcy again, and pulls off his glove to run one hand through her hair while Claire’s not looking. She doesn’t shift, but on her far side, Foggy makes a mumbling noise that sounds a little like a swearword and curls his hands into loose fists.

Claire has her bag out and on the counter by the time he gets up, has gloves on and her hair up by the time he gets the damn shirt off and settles himself with his hands on the tile. She doesn’t look at his face, peeling the tape off the gauze with careful fingers. “You said you learned how to take a beating from your dad,” she says. “Did you mean it literally?”

“No.” He can’t even muster the energy to be angry, right now. “He was a boxer. Guess it runs in the family.”

“Guess it must, because if I had my way you’d be lying in a hospital bed with a saline drip right now.” She sets aside the protective gauze, and peels away the second layer as carefully as she can, dropping it into a garbage can at her feet. “You shouldn’t be moving with these, let alone fighting. Or sitting on top of moving vehicles.”

“If I stayed in bed, then Kate and Ben would probably be dead right now.”

“Mm.” Claire bends, and sets two careful fingers to the skin beside the sutures. “How many times has this been fixed since it was originally done?”

“Probably more than it should have been.”

“I can tell.” Her eyebrows go up. “She did a decent job. She’s not a trained surgeon, but at least she kept your intestines from falling out. Thanks to me, by the way,” she adds, and then presses her fingers to a bruise on his ribs, pushing in just enough to feel the break. “That’s not gonna go away anytime soon, either.”

“I can’t exactly stop right now.”

“I need you to realize how damn lucky you are to be alive, Matt.” She touches another bruise, finds another break. He could just tell her that there are four, but it’s kind of hard to talk over the bite of snapped bones against each other. “Hooked blade in the gut, three—four, Christ. Four broken ribs. If that knife had gone a quarter of an inch to either side it could have perforated the lining of your intestine and we wouldn’t be talking right now, let alone arguing about whether or not you should be getting bed rest.”

“I’m just lucky, I guess,” he says. Claire snorts, and smacks his shoulder with one gloved hand.

“Smartass.” She picks through her case, and pulls out a fresh pack of gauze, tape, scissors. “You’re lucky she puts up with your shit, because I’m pretty sure I would’ve been sick of it eventually.”

Matt can’t think of what to say. He swallows, tries to get moisture back into his mouth. “Yeah, well. She’d probably be better off not having to deal with it.”

“If you say that to her face I guarantee you she will scrape out your eyes. Then you’d really need the glasses, just so people don’t freak at the holes in your face.” She cuts a bit of tape free, folds it over the gauze. “Just from what I know about her, anyway.”

 _Don’t think about it,_ he thinks, but his stomach’s already churning, blood and smoke and burned skin and broken plastic, the tang of the rain drowning out the trail, _Christ, God, I’ll do anything, please don’t take her, please_ , and _you knew this would happen if you pulled her in, everyone you’ve ever cared about has been destroyed because of you_ —

 _You really think she would_ —

He shoves Stick out of his head, and swallows, again and again, until the nausea fades a little. If Claire notices, she doesn’t say anything. She tapes down the other side of the gauze, leans back. “Don’t do anything too heroic over the next few days, all right? Just—take it easy.”

“Can’t make any promises.” He swallows one more time. “How angry are you with me?”

Claire pulls one glove off, and drops it in the trash. She doesn’t look up. Her heart, though—it’s jumped, uncomfortably, jolting out of tune with itself. “About the stitches or about the ribcage?”

“Claire.”

For a second, he thinks she’s just going to ignore him. Then she sighs, deep through her nose, the air stirring around her face like smoke from dragonsbreath. “I was angry. And then I spent some time on my own upstate, away from—this—” she gestures, not just at him but at the room, at Foggy and Darcy asleep on the floor and Karen in the bed in the back and the windows that all have the curtains pulled and the garbage can filled with bloody bandages “—and I think I kinda came to a point of peace with it.”

He rolls that over in his head. “I’m not—I’m not asking because I wanted to—”

“I know you didn’t. Idiot.” She snaps off her other glove. “I might not know a lot of the person you are outside of the—the flipping and the fighting and the morally grey areas of vigilantism, but I really, really doubt you’d be the type to try and pull the cheater card.” Claire gives him a look from beneath her eyebrows. “Unless I read that wildly wrong and you two _aren’t_ dating.”

“There hasn’t exactly been time to go out to dinner.”

“Very funny, lawyer-man.” She puts her hands on her hips. “I can say this for the pair of you, at least you’re trying not to be assholes about it.”

That is not a statement he’s going to touch with a ten foot pole. Or with nitroglycerin. Matt sets his jaw. There are words building up in his chest, but he can’t quite voice any of them without snapping bones inside. Claire cocks her head, and then reaches out with one hand, and touches her fingers to the bruise over his cheekbone.

“We would have shattered eventually,” she says. “Regardless. You know that, right?”

He swallows. “Because of what I do.”

“That’s—that would have been a big part of it, yeah.” She takes a breath. “I can’t—I can’t approve of what you’re doing. Not if you—not if you enjoy it, the way you say you do. Not if you’re dancing on that edge. I’m not good at waiting on the sidelines, Matt. I wouldn’t have been able to take waiting for you to come back every night, not knowing if you were dead in a ditch. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the—the constant strain of knowing that you were going out there, and hurting people, and not knowing if you were doing it because they needed to be stopped, or because you just…wanted to. I drew the line for myself. So no. I’m not angry with you. And I’m not angry that the pair of you have something, because you’re both—you both matter to me. And it might not have been the way either of us expected, especially at the start, but that’s not gonna change.” Claire blinks a few times, and then pats his cheek. “And plus, y’know, I had one last look at you shirtless just now. So don’t make that face at me, okay?”

A laugh snags halfway out his mouth, turns into a wheeze. His ribs creak again. “Ow.”

“You should be sleeping, and not guilting. Like you’re going to listen to me about that part.”

“I won’t be able to. You should, though.”

“Are we gonna do this?” she says, and her eyebrows quirk. “You’re gonna tell me _I_ need sleep.”

“You sound tired.”

“Yeah, because I have a bunch of freeloaders in my living room and apparently all of us are on the wrong side of a—a sociopathic asshat who decided to try and burn Manhattan down so he could turn it into District Twelve. I think I’m okay not sleeping for one night.”  

Matt pulls his shirt back over his head, carefully. “You should still rest.”

Claire stows her kit underneath the table by the door. Her hands go still on the latch. “I said that—that a lot of why we wouldn’t have worked would have been because of this.” She swallows. “And that’s—I wasn’t lying.”

“I know you weren’t.”

“Right.” She closes her eyes for a second. “I know there are people who can—who can have feelings for more than one person at once. A friend of mine, she’s poly. She’s in an open relationship with two different guys right now. And she’s happy, and they’re happy, and that’s not—that’s not strange to me. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, it’s just how some people are. I’m…not that.”

“I would never have—”

“I know.” Her mouth goes crooked, half-smiling, half not. “But Matt, even when—even before I heard from her, I could tell how much she meant to you. It was all over your face, when I asked about her. Can you tell me it wouldn’t have been a part of the shattering?”

He can’t. Matt shuts his eyes, and breathes, very quietly, very slowly. _I’ve been in love with you since I was eighteen,_ he’d said, and he hadn’t lied to her. He’d never quite understood it, but he hadn’t lied. He can’t really remember _not_ being in love with her, and even through Elektra, that had never—never really changed. And he’s not sure if that’s wrong or not, or if that makes him twisted, or if he should be ashamed of himself for it, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

( _You really think that—_ )

“Good night, Matt,” says Claire, and he jolts back into himself. Karen makes a soft noise in her sleep, like she’s been struck.

“Good night,” he says. Claire turns away. She doesn’t sleep, and neither does he, but they sit in their own corners until the sun comes up.

_Don’t think about it._

But he’s already started, and he knows now that it’s begun— _your fault,_ he thinks, _your fault, the same way it’s always been_ —there’s no way he’s going to get it to stop.


	14. Samson and Delilah - Broomstick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings have all been posted on other chapters.
> 
> I feel like a lot of Foggy and Matt's fallout and rebuild were dealt with in canon, and I didn't want to mess with that, because, um, why change perfection? So just Foggy's chapter became Foggy's, Father P's, Tandy's, and Ty's chapter, because they needed some Matt Murdock time. Or Matt needed some of their time, because this loser has a network now, even if he's only just, y'know. Really starting to realize it. 
> 
> ALERT: If you would like info on update statuses, general PSAs, and other information, please like my Facebook page! I don't always have time to get onto Tumblr and write out announcements, especially at work, but I can access Facebook at work without anyone blinking an eye, so there's always a way to check up on the Time Remaining posts. Just search Shu of the Wind and you should find me. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed.

He shouldn’t even be walking, really, not right now. Claire had been right, and had always been right, and it’s a miracle that he’s not broken worse than he already was when he went after Fisk. He’s sore, the inside of his mouth is still bloody, his ribs scream every time he takes a breath and he’s limping and he looks (according to Karen) like he’s been punched in the eye with a spiked mace, but for the most part, he’s standing and functional.

He wants to sit. He wants to _sleep._ He’s not sure he’ll be able to manage deep sleep again for months after this, but right now he’s too damn exhausted to wake up even when he has nightmares. He wants to sleep, and he wants to wake up and have Darcy breathing in and out against his throat, and then he wants to fall asleep again, because that might be better than falling asleep the first time.

(Darcy had been mostly unconscious when he’d rapped on the window, almost too softly, but she’d heaved it open with a sleepy hello and curled into him as soon as he’d settled, and God, he hadn’t wanted to leave her this morning. _Alive,_ he thinks, _alive and well and mine,_ and he can still only just wrap his mind around the idea, that that’s true. _Lilith, and Darcy, and Daredevil, and Matt._ Twined together and tangled up and built into each other, reaching and striving and digging their nails in when the other person needs holding back, and God, _God_ —)

He shouldn’t be walking. But he is, because he’d promised Lantom that he’d come back if he survived, and he feels like that—broken and bruised and somehow, impossibly, happy—is somehow surprising. So he touches his lips to Darcy’s hair (she makes a little noise in the back of her throat and rolls into the space he leaves behind) and makes his way over to the cathedral on foot, carefully, because he can't exactly hail a taxi while he's carrying his cane.

Tandy and Ty are here. He supposes he should have expected it, really. His senses can’t tell him what someone is thinking, can’t tell him if someone believes another person or if they decide to do something, but it’d been something that felt inevitable, Tandy and Ty winding up at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Tandy’s sweeping, her torn jeans and her heavy sweatshirt (it reads _Columbia,_ and smells like the church laundry detergent; a donation, maybe) drowning her. Her hair’s clean, though, and even if her bones still seem to be scraping against each other, she’s at least not laced with the street. “Hi,” she says, when Matt stops in the doorway. “Um, are you looking for Father Patrick?”

At the back of the room, Ty looks up from where he’s running a cloth over the pews, and goes still and bristling. Matt passes his cane from one hand to the other, and rests his gloved fingertips against the door frame. “Bit early for mass, isn’t it?”

“I’m a volunteer,” says Tandy. It’s not quite a lie, not quite truth. Her heart lurches a little when she says it. “Um, I can go get him if you want.”  

“It’s fine. I can wait.” He tapes his cane around until it hits the basin, and pulls off one glove to touch the holy water to his forehead, cross himself. Tandy watches him do it, spellbound. He wonders if this is the first time she’s seen a parishioner come in, if Father Lantom has told her anything about where she’s staying or if he’s just let her in without questions.

( _Father Lantom likes people who ask hard questions._ )

“You come here a lot?” Tandy asks curiously, dropping down into the pew opposite from the one Matt picks. She props her elbows on the arm. “Only we’ve been here three days and I think you’re the first person who’s shown up outside of a sermon or something.”

“When I need to.” She doesn’t smell like drugs, or like alcohol, or like disease. She watches him with the leeriness of a wildcat, but she’s not timid, either. The street hasn’t wrecked her the way it could have. “You’re a volunteer?”

“We both are.” She gestures at Ty, and then blushes when she remembers the cane. “Um, me and Ty. He’s over by the altar.”

“I’m Matt,” Matt says.

“Father P’s j-just c-c-cataloguing the last of the stuff in the b-b-back,” says Ty. “He should b-be out i-in a minute.”

“Like I said,” says Matt. “I don’t mind waiting.”

Ty falls quiet again, staring at him. He creeps closer to Tandy.

“What happened to your face?” Tandy says, and Matt can’t help it. He coughs a little, trying not to laugh.

“Car accident,” he says easily. “Taxi wasn’t looking.”

“Ouch.” She actually means it, Tandy. She flinches and shuts her eyes and curls her hands closer to herself, like she’s reliving something. “That sucks.”

“Gets me out of work for a few days. I’m all right with it.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a defense attorney,” Matt says. Ty’s picked a spot by Tandy’s pew, arms crossed over his chest. The looming would work if he weren’t still horrifyingly skinny. And if he actually thought Matt could see him. “I have my own firm, I make my own hours.”

“Oh,” says Tandy, and closes off immediately. “Sorry to bother you.”

“It’s okay.” He leans back, carefully. Father Lantom’s standing in the door to the lounge, watching quietly. “We're vultures, right? Friend of mine has a million and one lawyer jokes. I’d tell you one, but it’d probably, y’know. My ribs hurt.”

“Your friend t-t-tells you lawyer jokes.”

Matt blinks a few times, and then corrects himself. “Girlfriend. Sorry. That’s, um.” He clears his throat. “Yeah, she knows a lot of them.”

Tandy looks up at Ty for a moment. “She a lawyer?”

( _It’s Darcy and it’s Lilith and she’s standing in a circle of Karen and Claire and Santino, the mask pulled down over her face and her hands gloved and it’s like dreams and nightmares melded, etching themselves into his bones—_ )

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” Tandy says. “Taxi try to run you over because of a suit or something?”

“Ah, no. Not exactly.”

“I thought I asked you to clean,” Father Lantom says, and Tandy jumps so badly that she knocks her funny bone against the rim of the pew. Heat flushes up into her face. “Not chat with parishioners.”

“Sorry, Father P,” she says, and darts away to find her broom again. Ty trails after her like a puppy, hands in his pockets. They’re out of range of Matt and Father Lantom within a minute, but Matt can still hear them perfectly. (“—seems nice for a lawyer—” “—d-d-don’t be stupid, Tandy—”)

“So,” says Father Lantom, and Matt snaps to attention. “You survived. I saw the papers this morning. Quite a splash, apparently.”

“Mm.” Matt wraps both hands around the handle of his cane. “Well. Symbols need names.”

“ _Daredevil,_ ” says Father Lantom in an undertone, and sits down, a little ways down the pew. “Where on earth did you get _Daredevil_? Sounds like a stuntman from the seventies.”

People keep trying to make him laugh today. It’s not helpful. “Uh. Something people would call me in middle school, after the accident. I would stay inside a lot, not break rules.” Well, not openly, anyway. “Thought it was ironic.”

“That’s one word for it.” Father Lantom cocks an eyebrow. “Heard what you said to Tandy.”

“About the lawyer jokes?”

“She’s doing okay?”

( _Why does it seem so hard for you to understand that someone cares about you enough to stop you from doing something really fucking stupid?_ she’d asked, and he’d bitten it off, the automatic response. _Because I’m not worth that. I’m not ever going to be worth you dying._ He doesn’t think different, even now. He’d put himself between Fisk and Darcy and he’d do it again, over and over again, without thinking, without even considering, because it’s her. Before everything it would have killed him to lose her, and now—Christ, he doesn’t want to think about what would happen to him now, what he’d become. Something darker and more terrible than Stick had ever asked him to be.)

( _I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to stop being in love with you. And I don’t want to._ )

“She’s all right,” Matt says, finally. “She’s tired.”

“So are you, judging by your face. One hell of a taxi.”

“Hm.” He resettles his fingers. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“How you holding up?”

“Like a good Catholic,” Matt says, and Father Lantom snorts.

“Sure you are.” He eyes Matt again. “What did you come here for? Could’ve called.”

Matt’s not entirely sure. He tips his head back, ignoring the tug and pull of the scabs under his jaw. It’s—he hasn’t felt welcome in a church since his father died, not for years, but even with the creeping sense that he’s not supposed to be here, it’s…it’s soothing, strangely. It’s a familiar echo, a familiar smell. Candles and coffee and stone and the wafer-thin pages of the Bible tucked beneath the pew in front of him, stained from years of use. It sands away at chafing edges.

“I needed to,” Matt says. Father Lantom chuffs in the back of his throat.

“Suit yourself,” he says. “You need anything, give a shout. I have work to do.”

“All right.”

“Tell your girlfriend I said hello,” says Father Lantom. “And that the Dungeons and Dragons circle meetings have moved to Tuesdays.”

“Dungeons and Dragons?” Matt says, but Father Lantom’s already walked away, hands linked loosely behind his back. Tandy and Ty are still whispering.

He sits until he’s overstayed his welcome, until the rain starts to pour outside, and then he slips out before anyone can notice him go.

He’s halfway back to Darcy and Jen’s, and he’s completely soaking wet ( _rain,_ he thinks, _rain everywhere, the echo of the streets and manhole covers, fire escapes and people and cars and cats, the whole world painted out not in smoke, for once, but mist and cool blues and greys—_ ) when his phone goes off in his pocket. “Foggy,” says the recording, “Foggy,” and something jolts uncomfortably underneath his ribs. Matt taps at the screen, and swipes the cane from side to side until it clunks into a space between two buildings, so he can step off the sidewalk and underneath an awning, out of the rush of water. When he puts the phone to his ear, he can hear the buzz of a taxi radio. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Foggy says. He’s far too upbeat, too chipper, the way he always does when he’s trying to cover up something else. “I didn’t think you’d be awake. I tried Darcy before I remembered, y’know, her phone—phones—are like…dead as doornails.”

“She’s asleep.” Matt presses his back against the wall, and lifts his cane up off the ground, holding it like a walking stick, instead. “Or she was when I left.”

He can practically hear Foggy blinking at that one. “Wait, man, you left? Is there something else that still needs doing, like—more superspy hero stuff, because like, that was not mentioned when we all parted ways like ten hours ago—”

“Nah, it’s nothing.” Overhead, the sky rumbles, jittering down into his bones. “I told—I told someone I’d come into church today, let him know if things went okay. Just—I’m on my way back now. I’ll be back at Jen and Darcy’s in an hour.”

Foggy rolls that around. “You told your priest?”

“Sanctity of the confessional. Only place I could talk about it and not worry about it being leaked.”

“You thought we would leak it?”

“God, Foggy, no, I didn’t mean—”

“I’m teasing,” Foggy says, and Matt lets out a whoosh of air that he hadn’t known he was holding. “Seriously, makes sense. I know you’re like—the dark and silent guy who carries the weight of the world on his moody shoulders and everything, but if you were keeping your mouth shut to _everyone_ pre-Claire then you probably would have like…congealed into a puddle of angst on the sidewalk.”

Matt tries hard not to laugh, and ends up making an odd hiccupping noise that’s a bit too high-pitched to not be slightly hysterical. “Don’t—don’t make me laugh while I have broken ribs. That doesn’t help.”

“Vengeance is mine,” says Foggy lightly, but there’s a bit of the truth mixed up in there too, a thumb pressed into a fresh bruise. “Seriously, regard it as some payback for all the shit you put me through. Because it was a lot.”

He knocks his head to the wall, and then winces. He’s not sure if it’s a bruise or a scab or something else, but something painful just happened in relation to brick, and he doesn’t want it to happen again. (He’s busted a scab. He smells the blood a second later, warmth tingling at the back of his head. At least his skull isn’t cracked.) “Foggy—”

“If you tell me sorry again, I’m going to tear your leg off and I’m going to beat you with it until you pass out from blood loss. And then I’m going to call Claire so she can work another miracle and fix it” Foggy considers. “Well, fix most of it. I feel like we’re just going to spend the rest of our lives coming up with increasingly impossible reasons for why you’re beat to shit all the time.”

“Not the rest of our lives,” Matt says, feeling inexplicably light. “Well. I hope not.”

“You’re stubborn as fuck, Matt, you really think you’d be able to quit?”

Matt’s not entirely sure he knows how to answer that.

“Anyway.” Foggy clears his throat. “I should be at Darcy and Jen’s in like…three hours? Three hours. I need to get some things done first, namely, developing alibis for Karen and me if anyone actually asks where we’ve been the past few days. Also, buying pizza, because that’s a thing I’m bringing over.” He hesitates. “You want anything?”

He shuts his eyes. “No. I’m good.”

“Coffee it is, then,” says Foggy, and hangs up.

Matt steps out into the rain, turns his face up into it, and lets the world wash him away.


	15. Devil's Advocate - Cruella

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> None that I can really think of, aside from one or two mentions of blood. And kidnap.
> 
> Next week is the last! We are at last bound, my friends, deep into the emotional minefields of Crucifixion. For now, have Vanessa being a boss.

Vanessa Marianna’s current gallery is called Scene Contempo, but one of her previous ones was called Wile, and Matt thinks about that a lot more about that than he really should, perched in a chair in the office, listening to Karen and Foggy argue. _Wile_ , he thinks. _Wile_. Trick, deception, scam, hoax. Irony doesn’t even come close to reaching what this is. Wile. Vanessa Marianna and Wilson Fisk and their plan to save the city. Karen shoving the paper in his face. ( _You know he can’t see that_ , but Darcy describes it, quietly, the microphone and Wesley and Vanessa in the background, standing at Fisk’s flank, waiting.)

He wonders if Vanessa Marianna is a trick. 

“There’s not a lot for her online.” Karen taps her toes against the floor. Her nails are fraying along the edges, polish chipping. “Basic stuff. She’s from Israel, she has a degree in art history, she’s helped manage other big-name galleries across the city. Scene Contempo is her first solo deal and it’s really popular, by the look of it. I don’t know half these artists but the price range is astronomical.” 

“Wonder how she wound up tangled with Fisk,” Foggy says, but Matt’s not entirely sure that’s how that happened, either. He doesn’t say it, though. Darcy’s already gone, off with Mrs. Cardenas on their way back to the tenement, wigged and disguised as best they can manage on short notice. The taxi’s carried her out of hearing range. “He’s like Voldemort, and she’s…not.”

 _This is the worst possible time for this, isn’t it,_ Darcy says in his head, and Matt shuts his eyes behind his glasses and pushes the thought away.

“We don’t know that she’s not,” Karen says. “For all we know she—she buys Dalmatian puppies by the thousands and has them skinned at her feet.”

“Slow down there, killer,” says Foggy, and Karen makes an elaborate face at Foggy’s back when he turns to grab his baseball. Matt doesn’t mention it. “She’s probably caught up in this the way the rest of the city is. She might actually even believe that he’s not like…the spawn of Satan.”

“I’m not going to give her the benefit of the doubt until she’s earned it,” says Karen.

“Innocent until proven guilty, Karen, that’s how the law works.”

“Yeah, well, I just feel like we don’t have that luxury anymore.” 

“I’m gonna go talk to her,” says Matt, and heaves himself up out of the chair. Karen’s foot misses a step, and her heel knocks against the leg of her chair. Foggy catches the ball again, and sighs.

“You serious?”

“Pretty sure it’s past time I invested in some art,” Matt says. 

“Not funny, Matt. If she’s affiliated with Fisk he could be keeping an eye on the place, we can’t—if we get on his radar again he might start realizing we’re trying to figure him out.”

“Doubtful he hasn’t already realized that, thanks to Psycho Killer Qu’est-ce Que C’est,” says Karen doubtfully. She bites her lip. “You sure you want to go alone?”

“More than one of us would be suspicious,” he says, as he grabs his coat. “If it’s just me on my own, then it can be a coincidence.” 

“Hate to point out the obvious, but a blind guy going into an art gallery on his own is already a little suspicious.”

“You and Darcy complain all the time about how boring my apartment looks.”

“I mean, yeah, valid, but—Jesus, Matt, we should at least talk about this a little more—”

“It’ll be fine, Foggy,” says Matt. “Don’t stress. I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

Foggy passes his baseball from one hand to the other, and rocks on his feet. “If you say so,” he says, finally, and gestures sharply at Karen when she goes to open her mouth. “If you die I’m not paying for your funeral.” 

“Duly noted,” says Matt, and shuts the door behind him.

The cab (hailed for him by one of the people from the financial office next door) takes about forty minutes to get to Scene Contempo, thanks to a car accident that redirects all the traffic through the Garment District. The place is on the seventh floor of a smaller skyscraper, deep uptown. The whole place has been remodeled, he thinks, as he steps out of the elevator and a security guard mutters his arrival into a walkie-talkie. It smells of plaster and paint, even beneath the rich oils of the canvasses, and the place has been designed to make sure no sunlight falls on any of the pieces. To prevent damage, he supposes. There are maybe half a dozen people here outside of the staff, and more security guards than he would have expected even for a high-quality, high-priced gallery like this one.

 _Heels_ , he thinks, first. Stilettos. There’s a certain pop to stilettos that lower heels don’t have, a sharpness that gets carved into the sound from the way the points hit the floor. Hairspray. Something close to jasmine, but darker, as if it’s been twisted with something else he can’t make out. She clears her throat a little, and she’s smiling. “May I help you?”

“I hope so,” Matt says. _Vanessa_ , he thinks. _Vanessa Marianna_. There’s another scent laid over hers that he doesn’t know, male, heavier. He’s in here somewhere. Matt’s not sure he knows that one. She watches him, unblinking, and there’s…he can’t work out what it is about her that’s unsettling him. “You’re—you’re wondering what a blind man is doing in an art gallery.”

“Am I that obvious?” says Vanessa, and her mouth curls into a comma shape. Matt shakes his head a little. 

“I’d wonder too.” He considers it for a moment, and then holds out a hand. “I’m Matthew.”

“Vanessa,” she says, and clasps it. Her manicure is freshly done, and she uses jasmine lotion, too, that might be why the scent’s difficult to parse out. “Now, if I can ask—did you come here looking for anything in particular?”

“I’ve had people tell me that my apartment is…” he searches for a word. “That it’s stark. I was thinking maybe art would help.”

“It usually does,” says Vanessa, and slips her arm through his. They’re about the same height. There’s a shift to her, a balance that he can’t quite place until he thinks of passing martial artists on the street. She might not be trained, he thinks, but she at least knows how to use her center of gravity to her advantage. “I’m assuming that these people were women.”

_I don’t like fighting with you._

_I don’t like fighting with you, either._

“I’m not trying to impress the pizza guy,” says Matt, and Vanessa laughs.

“It’s good that you’re honest about it.” He bites his tongue, and she continues. “All you really need to appreciate art is honesty.”

“I’m sure sight helps too.”

“Generally, it does, but there’s—there’s something incredibly intimate about experiencing art through someone else’s eyes.” She cuts him a glance. “That’s a good line. If you don’t use it, I’ll be disappointed.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” 

_What are you?_ he thinks. He’s chasing scents and sounds and ideas. _Who are you?_ Jasmine and stilettos and a shift to her weight like she’s ready to move. _Innocent until proven guilty,_ Foggy had said, and maybe he’d have kept that in mind, maybe he’d have thought of her like that ten minutes ago, two hours ago, but—

_We’ve talked about this before when you were Mike, and we will talk about it again and again until it finally clicks, because I will not be told what to do. I know what I’m doing, and I’m not stupid._

(And Vanessa’s managed a number of galleries in a city of over eight million people, she moved here from another country, she’s stood at Wilson Fisk’s back and from what he knows about the man, from what he knows about his paranoia and his cruelty, he wouldn’t have picked someone incapable of thought, he wouldn’t have chosen someone who couldn’t keep up with him, even if it was only on instinct, and some part of Matt starts to think that _we’re the same that way, me and Fisk, the pair of us_ —)

( _Some part of her is already in the dark_ —)

“So?” says Vanessa. “Give me some idea of what you’re after.”

“I don’t have any clue.”

“Wonderful. Good art isn’t something you pick with an idea in mind. If you knew what you were after, then all you’d be doing is decorating, and I wouldn’t be showing you around.” She knocks into him, by accident, he thinks. The jasmine is going to strangle him. “Art should speak to you. It’s not supposed to just hang there, it’s supposed to move you, make you think.”

“Give me an example.”

“This one,” she says, and stops. “It’s one of my favorites.”

“Can you describe it to me?”

Vanessa hums, and considers for a second. “If you can imagine,” she says, “it’s—it’s a sea of reds. Different tones, different shades, all blending together into a symphony of color.”

“It sounds a little aggressive,” Matt says. His mouth has gone dry, for some reason.

“That’s always what red’s been,” Vanessa says. “Red is the color of aggression, violence. Some might say masculinity, though I always thought that it was more of a woman’s shade. But it’s also the color of—of love. It’s the color of passion, of the heart. And of hope.”

_—brick against his back and Darcy’s nails nipping into his scalp and his name caught on her teeth, Matt, Matt, and he can’t breathe, he can’t stop breathing her but he can’t get a full swallow of air—_

“It’s multifaceted,” Vanessa says. “Just like many people.”

“I always thought it was an illustration of rage,” Matt says. "Red."

“Rage, too, I suppose. But the variety and the multitudes of the painting makes you think about all of that. It’s a good conversation starter.” She gestures from herself to him and back, though she has to think he can’t see it. “As you can tell.” 

“You have a point.”

 _Rage,_ he thinks again. _The devil painted red._

“If you’re looking for something less…associated with conflict, then there are other pieces, but I think—” Vanessa hums again. “Forgive me if I’m too forward, but I don’t think you’re much of a man for simplicity.”

“Are you a psychologist?” Matt says, smiling, but inside something curls and snaps. “Or is this just the result of practice?”

“I’ve always had a knack.” Vanessa hooks hair behind her ear. “But I don’t think I’m wrong. You’re compelled by the complex.” 

“That’s what people tell me,” Matt says. “I’d rather sit at home and read, most days, but the world’s too loud for that.”

“I suppose it is.” 

“What else do you see about me?” he says. “With your knack.”

Vanessa’s mouth shifts again, into a different shade of smile. “Matthew, are you hitting on me?”

Matt shakes his head. “You seem to take a highly personal approach to matching person with painting. I was just…curious as to the process.”

“I see.” She touches a thumb to her lips for a moment, and then looks back to a painting. “Well, you arrived alone. Independent, quiet. A bit of a flirt,” she adds, and Matt laughs, actually, genuinely laughs, because she sounds so arch he can’t help it.

“Guilty, I’m afraid.” 

“I thought so,” she says. “Under all that—hm. You think a great deal, though you don’t voice much of it. You think very deeply and very often, and you don’t always trust what comes into your head.”

Something rocks under his feet. It might be the floor. It might be the building, he’s not sure. Matt wets his lips. _What the hell are you, Vanessa Marianna?_

“Of course, I might be wrong,” she says. “But I’m rather good at this, you know.”

“Hm,” Matt says, and goes quiet again for a moment. Then, because he can’t help it, he says, “Why does red encompass all of them?” 

For the first time, Vanessa pauses. She looks at him, blinking slowly, and the comma shape to her mouth curves tighter. “Love and rage and hope, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

She looks at the painting for a time. “Do you know,” she says, “I’m not sure. I’ve never thought about that, before.”

“It’s the color of blood,” says a voice, and he knows that voice, _he knows that voice—_

“Wilson,” says Vanessa, and there’s a star bursting in her chest, warmth flooding through her, her heart beating fast, her lips curving up into a real smile, and Christ, she’s in love with him, he has someone who loves him, but all of that is drowning beneath the sea of fury, the incandescence of it, sparking behind his eyes and on the back of his tongue—

“Sorry to interrupt,” says Fisk. “But red—red is the color of blood. And blood is what we draw on for all of those—those fears, those emotions, those passions.” He rests his fingertips to the small of Vanessa’s back, and Matt draws his arm away from her. He doesn’t want to be linked to Fisk. “Blood is rage, and love, and battle, and excitement. That, at least, is what I think.”

“And you bought _Rabbit in a Snowstorm_ anyway,” says Vanessa, and turns. “Matthew, this is Wilson Fisk. Matthew’s searching for a painting for his apartment, or so he tells me.”

“Matthew Murdock,” he says, and curls his free hand into a fist. 

He’s in the first floor lobby when his phone rings. 

“Foggy,” he says, when he answers, “I told you I’d be back—”

“Darcy’s gone,” Foggy says, and he’s hysterical, he’s breathing too fast and his voice is too high and for a second Matt’s too trapped in the sound of it to process the words. “Matt, Elena just—she just came back and she’s bleeding and she says someone tried to kill her and that some men took Darcy and Matt, Jesus, she’s gone—”

_The color of blood._

He flares out in a sea of red.


	16. The Crucifixion - Masks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ....kill me. I'm dead. Kill me.
> 
> Trigger warning: Violence, discussion of torture (post-occurence), some body squick, broken bones, discussion of eyeball squick, Extreme Rage Issues, absolute gut-wrenching terror (which I'm shaking from still, to be honest), guns, blood, knife wounds. 
> 
> Fuck me up, Matthew, Jesus Christ. 5K and I'm just...broken.

The world’s drowning him. He can’t breathe.

“I can’t do this,” Karen says. She’s snapped off three of her nails in the past five minutes, and she’s rocking a little. Matt’s not sure she even knows she’s doing it, swaying, back and forth like it’ll do something, like it’ll soothe her. “I can’t wait like this.”

“There’s nothing else we can do,” says Foggy. “We can’t just run out and look ourselves. If—if we do then we’ll make it harder for Brett, for the cops.”

“I can’t just sit here. She could be—” Karen stops, darts a glance at Matt. “I can’t just sit here.”

“They took her alive.” His hands are shaking where Foggy and Karen can’t see them, turned away as he is to fumble with the coffee press. Every second he stays here is a second the trail gets colder, but he’s trapped here with them, for now. He’s not sure he can move, even if he could go. He’s paralyzed. “That—they need her for something, if that’s the case.”

“For what?” Karen folds her arms closer around her ribs. “For—for what’s going on with Kate, for the mask, for what?”

 _For me._ It’s the only thing that makes sense, really. It’s the only that that meshes with everything Wesley said to her, though why the Japanese would do it instead of Wesley’s own men—

“It could be anything,” Foggy says finally. Karen’s staring hard at Matt’s back. He can feel it, a sunburn between his shoulder blades. Foggy can’t look up from the floor. He’s sitting with his hands laced together like he’s praying, bouncing one leg in a rhythm that’s almost frantic. Nervous sweat threads across the back of his neck. “Brett will find her.”

“Fisk owns the police, they won’t move fast enough.” Karen stands, and starts to pace. “Just—she said—Christ. I can’t just sit here, I _can’t_ —”

“What else are we supposed to do, Karen?” Foggy says. “What the fuck are we supposed to even _do_ right now—”

“I don’t know, but anything’s better than sitting around and waiting for something to happen—”

Very carefully, Matt pulls one of the mugs out of the cupboard, his back still turned to them. If they see his face, right now, he’s not sure what will happen. He’s not sure he’s wearing a mask. He can’t turn around.

“—owns the cops, the press, the DA’s office— _no one_ is going to look for her if it isn’t us, Foggy, no one is going to care, she could be dead already—”

Foggy recoils. “She’s not dead,” he says. His voice is wrecked. “She’s _not dead_.”

“If nobody does anything then she will be,” Karen snaps. There are tears on her cheeks. “Christ, we have to—we have to do _something_ , Matt—”

“What are we supposed to do?” Matt says. It feels like he’s snapping his own ribs apart. “Karen, what are we supposed to do?”

“Go look for her!” Karen flings her hands in the air. “Go—go talk to people, go find answers, go confront Fisk, you said he was just there at the gallery, we go and we try to find where he’s put her and we get her _out_ —”

“You do that and you’re going to be killed.”

She shakes her head. Hair sticks to her lip gloss. “ _I don’t care_.”

“Karen,” says Foggy, but she ignores him.

“Jesus Christ, Matt, you’re saying we should—we should sit back and not do anything? That we should leave it to Brett? To the _police_?” She scoffs. “What the hell? You know why we can’t do that—”

“ _Karen_ ,” says Foggy again, his heart beating fast, but it’s all faded, echoing oddly, as if all the sound in the room is being funneled through a hose—

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what the hell _are_ you saying, because it sounds like you think that we shouldn’t do anything when Darcy could be dead if we don’t—”

“Karen!”

“How the hell can you be so _calm_!” Karen shouts, and Matt slips. Just for a second, just for a moment, his control slips, and snaps apart. When he slams the mug back down onto the shit counter, it shatters in his hand. Karen jumps, her fingers going up to her mouth, her eyes round and unblinking. There’s a dull pain in the meat of his palm. Foggy gets up out of his chair, and touches two fingers to Karen’s elbow. There’s something burning in his mouth like acid. He can’t speak.

“Matt.” Karen tugs away from Foggy. She doesn’t reach out. If she reaches out now he’s not really sure what he’ll do, and that’s—he can’t be here right now. He _can’t_. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean it that way, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded—”

“It’s fine.” He pulls his sleeve forward over the cut. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not _fine_ , Matt, Christ,” Foggy says, but Matt’s already grabbed his coat. “Where are you going?”

“Out.” He grabs his cane, too. “I—out.”

Neither of them say anything as he shuts the door—carefully, so very, very carefully—behind him. He’s halfway down the stairs when Karen clears her throat. “I didn’t mean it like I thought he didn’t care.”

“I know.”

“I _didn’t_.” She sounds like she’s about to cry. “I wouldn’t—I know how much—”

Karen stops. 

“Let him clear his head.” Foggy swipes his hair back up out of his face. “Just—he’ll be back eventually. And—and with luck, Brett will have something we can tell him when he does.”

Karen shakes her head, and goes to pick up the shattered pieces of the cup. “You really think it’ll be that easy?”

“I don’t—really think I can think right now,” says Foggy.

Matt throws his cane into the nearest dumpster, and heaves himself up onto the fire escape. 

The cut on his hand has stopped bleeding by the time he gets to his apartment, and he whirls back out again in less than a minute. The city’s howling in his head. It could be his imagination, but he doesn’t think it is. There are so few cops out that it’s making him nervous, the idea that the trap has been set, the bait has been laid ( _Darcy, Darcy Darcy Darcy, hold on, please_ —) and now the path has been cleared for him to take. That’s exactly what this is. It has to be. They took her alive, and he has to hold onto that, he has to believe they did that for a reason instead of just leaving her body in Elena’s tenement for them to find—

(Elena had been crying when she’d made it back to the offices and there had been blood running all down her arm, the Spanish flying out of her so fast that even Matt could barely understand it, only catching a few words at a time, but she’d seized Foggy’s arm and shaken it hard as she’d said, “They say, _we have you_ , and they—they not need me, anymore, she make them promise—”

And of course she would make them promise to leave Elena alone, of course she would, and he can’t breathe, right now, he can’t _breathe_ —)

 _Think_. He paces, back and forth across a rooftop. _Think_. How is he supposed to think? He can barely even take a breath. It’s daylight, and he’s in costume, and there could be a dozen people who have seen him already, a hundred, but he doesn’t care about any of that, not now. He needs to move. He needs to work. _Come on, Matt, think_. 

(Fisk had been right there, standing across from him, smiling, talking, _knowing_ what was happening, he’d been right there and Matt should have killed him when he’d had the chance, should have popped his trachea and scooped out his eyes, killed him with his bare hands—)

_Think._

Elena. It had happened at the tenement. A drug addict, a gun. Blood on the floor. He folds his hands into fists, barely feels it when the cut starts to bleed again. Elena’s first. And then—and then he’s not sure. A drug addict, a gun. Fisk, talking about blood and red and paint. Vanessa Marianna. Darcy. ( _I don’t remember, what was the last thing I said to her, I don’t remember what I said_ —)

 _Start at the beginning_. 

A drug addict.

Matt bolts off the roof.

There are no police cars around Elena’s tenement. No, there’s one—it’s parked half a block down, the engine barely warm, a buzz at the edge of his senses. He feels exposed, a hulking black spider pacing in and out of the shadows in the alley, waiting for the cop— _Brett_ , he knows the click and the snap and the smell of him, herbal tea and peppermint gum and cheap aftershave—to clear out of Elena’s apartment. The blood’s drying on the floor, but it bites at him, claws. Heroin, he thinks. He can’t sort it out from this distance, not really. But the whole place stinks of heroin, of rotting wood and molding pipes and plaster from the holes in the walls.

Elena’s address is Apartment 315. There’s only one person on the third floor now, and it’s Brett, crouched down by the wall and jabbing at something with the end of his pen. There’s no police tape up. Matt’s not even sure forensics has been here yet. No other cops and of course there aren’t, this is Fisk. _A drug addict, and a gun_. Kill Elena, get the rest of the people here to clear out of the tenement. Had Nobu been following them, to know Darcy would be there? ( _I can’t remember what I said to her, and she can’t die, she can’t, if she dies I won’t_ —) Kill Elena, but take Darcy, because Elena would be an example but Darcy can’t be anything other than a consequence—

 _Apparently they’ve been watching me from the next building over_ —

And he knows that, he’d sent the photographer away, but there are pictures, there’s proof, and all he can think of is Jen and the odd little smile when she’d said _If you want to keep it a secret, you really shouldn’t smile at her the way you do_ —

“Shit,” Brett says under his breath, and stands, digging his phone out of his back pocket. “ _Shit_.” The tone rings out twice, and Brett doesn’t bother with hellos. “Where the hell are my ballistics results?”

“In process.” He doesn’t know the voice, clipped and male and sounding almost bored. There’s a fire yawning under his feet, and Matt’s not sure he isn’t going to slip right into it. _Bored, and one of Fisk’s, he’s probably one of Fisk’s_ —“I told you, Sarge, it takes a while.”

“We just had a new system installed, it shouldn’t take more than an hour to run the test—”

“We’re backed up.”

“Yeah, so’s pathology. And the scene techs. And everyone else.” Brett snaps gum between his teeth, like he’s breaking bone. “You’re stalling.”

“We can’t make the technology run any faster than it already is, Sarge.”

“So a woman’s been kidnapped by the big kahuna in the Japanese mafia, in front of witnesses, and there’s _nothing_ you can do to make this move a little faster?” 

“No,” says the tech, and he wants to _kill_ someone, wants to find a brick and smash it into bone, because _this is Fisk, this is Fisk_ —

“Work a miracle, then, Rodriguez, because if she ends up dead because someone in the lab was sitting on their ass then all of you are gonna be picking your teeth out of the gutter.” Brett hangs up before Rodriguez the scientist can say anything else. He dials again. “Where are you on finding the addict?”

“We have a name and a photo.” It’s a woman, this time. “We’re running it. Put out an APB. You know how hard it is to find addicts that have gone to ground, Sarge, he could be anywhere in the Kitchen.”

“Not with a hole in his leg, he can’t be.”

“We’re working on it,” says the woman. 

“Work _faster_.” 

“Sarge.” The woman hesitates. “Look, I know you know this lawyer, but we’re doing everything we can.”

“You ever see a sugaring, Officer?” says Brett. “Where you poke a hole in a tree and watch the sap run out?” 

“No, sir.”

“I have an aunt up in Vermont who does it every winter. Used to go up there as a kid and help. You know how sap moves in the wintertime? Pretty goddamn slowly.” Brett takes a breath. “That sap is moving faster than you. I don’t give a shit what else you have on your plate today. I don’t care what other cases you have. You bury it, and you get to work. Is that understood?”

The woman goes quiet. Then she says, “Yes, sir.” 

Brett disconnects. He stands there, very still, for who knows how long. Then he says, “ _Fuck_ ,” soft and vicious under his breath. His heart’s beating too fast. “Are you _fucking_ kidding me?”

They'd dated, he remembers. Brett and Darcy, they'd dated for a few weeks. They're friends, sort of. He knows.

Matt presses his back to the brick, three floors down and listening so hard it hurts, and shuts his eyes.

The blood trail dies out three blocks away from Elena’s building. Brett’s in the alley when Matt comes back, kicking through the dumpster—and it’s smart, really, because Matt can smell the gun, buried under three garbage bags and an old box of Chinese take-out. He doesn’t hear it when Matt drops off the fire escape, and he doesn’t hear it when Matt touches his gloved fingertips to the metal of the dumpster bin, but when Matt clears his throat and says, “Sergeant,” Brett has his gun up and out so fast that it doesn’t even matter that he’s standing in bags of garbage. Matt’s half in the shadow of the dumpster, as much as he can manage, but it’s a clear headshot, and they both know it. He lifts his hands. “Your people giving you trouble?”

“Shut your damn mouth,” says Brett. “Keep your goddamn hands up.”

“I’m not the enemy here, Sergeant.” 

“The hell you aren’t.” Brett breathes, in and out, trying to steady himself. “How many of my men have you killed already?”

“None of them.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m not what you think I am,” Matt says. “I’m not the one keeping your men sitting on their hands instead of finding her.”

Brett shakes his head. “Bull _shit_.”

“You’re not stupid. You know something’s going on. When has this ever happened before? A witnessed abduction at gunpoint and they’re not scrambling against the clock?” His heart’s beating too fast. He’s talking too much. _Christ. Slow down, Murdock_. “You already suspect something. You’re not an idiot.” 

“Shut _up_.”

“Listen to me, Sergeant. You can’t do this alone. You’ll never find her before she dies, not at this rate.” And even saying it is a punch to the gut, he doesn’t want to think about how his voice sounds, right now, about how easy it would be for Brett to put two and two together with this, how simple, and _God, if she dies, what_ — “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help.”

“Gimme one reason I shouldn’t put you down right now,” Brett says, but his finger isn’t on the trigger. Matt keeps his hands up. 

“Because I’m looking for her too.”

Brett’s heart jumps. He wets his lips. Then—and Matt almost can’t believe it, it happens so slowly, so very, very slowly—he drops his gun down. He doesn’t put it away, doesn’t lower it entirely, but it drops until the bead is aimed not at Matt’s head, but at the wall. 

“You know her,” Brett says.

Matt lets his hands curl, halfway into fists. When Brett doesn’t lift the gun again, he drops them down to his sides. “I know a lot of people, Sergeant.” 

“But you _know_ her,” Brett says again, and he hates Brett for being a good cop right now, hates that he’s good at his job, there’s no time for Brett to be nosy because statistically the longer it takes for him to find her the more likely it is that she’s dead and he can’t live with that, not her, not this—

“We’ve talked,” Matt says finally.

Brett looks down at his gun. Then he clips it back into the holster, folds the leather over the top and snaps it down. Matt stays back as he clambers out of the dumpster, out of reach, as shadowy as he can manage when the sun’s still up. He doesn’t care if Brett works him out. If it means he gets there faster he’d tell everyone in the city who he is and what he can do. Fisk hasn’t worked that out yet—if he had, he’d already have reached out and asked for it, and Matt would tell him, all his secrets and all his lies, the whole truth laid bare if it meant she would live. Brett is a side-note. 

“You tell anyone I did this,” Brett says, “and I will deny it up until you’re on death row for all the shit you’ve pulled in my neighborhood.” 

“Understood.” Matt draws back further, out of reach. “What do you know?”

It’s not much. A name. “Heroin addict,” Brett says. “And he had good drugs. Only thing I could get out of the lab, really. Pure, not cut. No plaster, no mixing, not anything. Stuff we’ve been seeing more of lately, marked with a snake.” _Fisk_ , he thinks, _the Goodmans, and what was the last thing I said to her, I don’t remember, it was only a few hours ago, how can I not remember—_

_Hold on, please—_

"Thank you," he tells Brett.

“Hey." Brett swallows, hard. "You think she’s alive?” 

Matt doesn’t say anything until he’s back on the fire escape, up and halfway gone. Brett’s watching him, unblinking, hand still on his gun, waiting for Matt to do something stupid. He licks his lips. 

“She has to be,” he says.

He’s gone before Brett can say anything else in response. 

_A drug addict, a gun_. It rings in his head. _A drug addict, a gun_. Everything else is fading. Snapping bones and muffled shouts as he finds dealers, addicts. _Where_. The sun sets, and the moon rises, cold against the back of his neck. He knows the man’s scent, the rotting teeth. He can’t find him anywhere near Metro-General, nowhere near an urgent care or an emergency clinic. He hasn’t gone for help, hasn’t taken in his GSW, hasn’t want to be reported. Which means he’s still bleeding. And the bastard should be, he thinks. Everything else is fading out of his head. He can’t come back, not if she dies. If she’s dead, he won’t fight with himself anymore, he won’t argue. If she’s dead, so is Fisk. If she’s dead, so is Nobu. If she’s dead, so is he. Not immediately, not quickly, it won’t happen that fast, but the recklessness, the wildness, the monster clawing up his throat and out his mouth, it’ll eat him alive. He’s too twined up in her to survive a severing. It’s not healthy, and it’s not fair, and it’s wrong of him to weigh on her like this, to depend on her like this, but if she dies he’s not going to come out the other side. Not whole. Not at all.

_A drug addict, a gun._

_What was the last thing I said to her?_

He tracks down the man with rotting teeth in a condemned tenement closer to the waterfront. It’s been used as a squatter’s den since before he can remember, since Matt was fifteen and sixteen and rushing over rooftops to keep the night echoing in his ears. It’s never been torn down—city issues, regulations—and the addicts have long since cut a hole in the chainlink to force their way in. It’s the city in miniature, filth and ineptitude and desperation, and when he pushes the door open there are rats under the floorboards. There are half a dozen people in here, in various highs and lows. One of them’s dead, propped up in the corner, the skin still warm. It’s not the right scent, though. He steps over another body, this one living, unconscious, and heads up the stairs. There’s blood smeared on the floor in the shape of a boot print. The bedroom’s a sty, and there’s only one person inside, sprawled across a couch with a strip of rubber around his arm and a syringe on the floor. His leg’s wrapped, but the hole—it’s covered, but barely, a wadded-up T-shirt and the bullet still inside. He’s half conscious, eyes flickering, and Matt—Matt can’t move. 

_I never said I was nice_ , he’d said. The last thing he’d told her before she’d walked out, and he hadn’t held her back. _I never said I was nice_. And he’s not. He’d been flirting, then, soaring, high on the blood in her cheeks and the smile on her lips and the beat of her heart, but it was the truth. He’s _not_ nice. He’s not anything close to what she deserves to have in her life, even with the violence in her, even with all her rage, and now she might be dead and it’ll be his fault if she is. The world’s on fire, and if she’s dead, he’s going to burn it to the ground. He’s going to take them all down with him, Nobu and Wesley and Vanessa and Fisk, he’ll drag them down and ruin them because if she’s dead, it won’t matter anymore. 

It’s not that she’s his goodness. It’s that with her, he remembers he can be good. With her, he _wants_ to be, not just for himself but for her, and if she’s dead, there’s no reason to remember that anymore.

( _Foggy_ , he thinks. _Karen_.)

( _You do that and you’re going to be killed_ , he’d said, and Karen, baring her teeth, had hissed, _I don’t care_.)

(They would understand.)

Elena’s in his head. _Darcy, she shoot—_

_A drug addict, a gun._

He doesn’t remember much else, but he remembers this with perfect clarity: the feel of old cloth tearing under his gloves, the weight of the man as he holds him up against the wall. “Tell me,” and the words taste like poison in his mouth, “ _tell me_ ,” and it echoes all through him when a bone snaps, not his, blood and raw marrow and broken skin, and the man is screaming, “ _I don’t know, what do you want, I don’t know, they paid me, they never said_ —”

“ _Who paid you_?” 

Alive, but barely.

Another name.

Yakuza men, at the waterfront. 

Another name.

His gloves are wet with red. The cut’s stopped bleeding. 

Another name. 

He’s playing right into their hands, and he doesn’t care. 

“ _Where_ ,” he says, and they tell him, because they have no other choice.

He starts catching hints of her near the front door of the warehouse, blood and warmth and salt. It’s a splash of cold water in his face, a rush of blood to his head, to his hands. He nearly loses his balance, and he has to swallow his heart back down. _A trap_ , he thinks again, because this warehouse—there are people inside, multiple people, but the hallways are clear even as the surveillance cameras hum in the walls. _A trap_. No point in not going in through the front door. His gloves leave smears on the wood. Aftershave. Not just Wesley’s but Fisk’s, echoing and shadowy, laced with jasmine. ( _I had him, he was right in front of me and I had him and I could have killed him and I didn’t and now_ —) Other people. Gunpowder. Honey shampoo. He touches his fingertips to the wall beside a button camera, and fights the urge to crush it. The closer he gets, the more he can catch. Her heartbeat’s too fast ( _her heart’s beating, thank God, thank God_ ) and she’s awake, she’s conscious, she’s alive and stinking of blood and terror, of Wesley, of someone else, a scent from the hallway that he hadn’t quite noticed, dry and salty as beach sand, mixed with oil paint and horsehair brushes. _A trap_ , because the room is empty aside from her, but there are people all around, and only one door, it’s the top floor and there’s only one way out. _A trap_.

The blood’s crusting on the backs of his gloves, but it’s sunk right through into his bones.

_A trap._

_I don’t care._

He opens the door.

Darcy makes a sound like she’s been kicked in the chest, high and tangling in the back of her throat. It’s muffled, and it’s awful, and it’s something he’s never going to forget, because _she’s alive_ , and he’d known that, but _she’s alive_ , and he’d been petrified, and _she’s alive, God, thank you,_ tears on her cheeks and blood spattered across her shirt, over her sleeves. She’s choking on something, trying to inhale, and he doesn’t remember crossing the room, he just remembers touching his fingertips to her face and fumbling with the knot of the gag, clumsy, terrified. “Hey.” He can’t get a full breath of air, and it doesn’t matter, because _alive, she’s alive, she’s alive_. “Hey, breathe. You’re okay.”

 _You’re okay_.

“—trap,” she says, and she’s stumbling over her tongue, the word tangled between her teeth, “it’s a trap, they’re going to try and kill you, you have to go—”

There’s something so terribly, terribly wrong with her hand. Tape and blood and snapped bone. Matt—and he’s Matt, again, he’s not sure when he stopped wearing the name, but it’s back—tears at the tape, at the bonds, and he can’t breathe, he’s drunk on the sound of her heart because _she’s alive, God, please_ — “I know. It’s okay.”

“Why don’t you _listen to me_?” She’s sobbing. He can’t get close enough. _Alive and here and alive_ , and he’s burning with it, burning up, _I haven’t failed you yet, you’re alive, and nothing else matters_ — “You never listen to me, Nobu’s _here_ , Wesley’s _here_ , they want you dead, they u-used me to get to you, you need to _go_ —”

He’s not listening, not really. He hears her voice, not the words. Broken fingers. Broken wrist, snapped inside, bones rubbing up against each other. And Christ, God, they’ve put a knife through her, her hand is bloody and wrecked and that’s because of him, because he’d been too slow, too stupid to realize what was happening before Wesley ever even knew she existed. Matt yanks off his glove—fingerprints don’t matter, none of it matters, he found her, she’s alive—and picks at the second piece of duct tape, as carefully as he can, trying not to touch the places where she’s broken. “We’re both leaving here. Only option.”

And that part—that’s not true. There are loads of options. The only ones he’ll accept are the ones where she lives, and some of those mean him dying, and that’s—he doesn’t care about that piece. She lives. That’s all. 

“ _Don’t be a fucking hero right now_.” She seizes his shirt collar, drags him closer to her, her hand shaking. “You need to leave. You need to _leave_. If they kill you then it’s done, it’s all done, we’ll never be able to stop Fisk, you can’t just—” And she heaves a breath and tears run down her face, streaks of salt against her skin, her heart racing underneath his skin and her hand scorching at his throat. “I’m not going to let you die just because of me—”

 _No. Christ, no_. He can’t speak. _I’m not going to let you die just because of me_ , and that’s—that’s obscene. That’s anathematic. That’s _wrong_. It’s so, so deeply wrong, like poison ivy in his teeth, like needles in his heart, like something black and vile has been poured down his throat and bloated him up inside, poisoning him slowly. He’s not being a hero. He’s never been that. She’s never quite caught that, but he’s not a hero. He just wants her alive. He’s as careful as he can when he peels the tape off her skin, sets it aside. Darcy’s watching him, hyperventilating, her eyes wet and her face hot and her heart, God. Her heartbeat. He wants to rest his ear to her chest and let it drown him. Matt swallows, and then reaches up and touches his hand to her cheek. There’s another heartbeat in the room, echoing, slow and calm. It hadn’t been there before, but that doesn’t matter. It’s her and him and her breathing, and he doesn’t care about the newcomer, what he might see or what he might read. He doesn’t _care_. Darcy’s fingers seize up against his throat. She shuts her eyes and leans into his hand and _you’re alive, you’re alive, I’ll do anything to keep you that way, just—no matter what happens to me, stay alive for me, please_. He can’t say it aloud, but when he stands, kisses her—not her mouth, but the dampness of her forehead, and even that makes her breathing catch, has her nails digging into his shirt—he thinks she hears it.

 _You’re alive_ , he thinks, and breathes. _You’re alive, and if I die for you that’s enough. That’s always been enough._

“Do I have you to thank for this?” he says. “Or Fisk?”

(And then he’s on the ground, and she’s standing between him and Wesley and Fisk, her arms spread and her heart steady and all he can think is _Christ, no, please, no, no_ as Fisk says, “You’d die for this man in the mask?”

“Did I fucking stutter?”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...yeah. I may come back to _cage_ eventually, but for now...that's a wrap, y'all.


End file.
